


Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me

by ladderax (allnuthatchforest)



Category: Inception (2010), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alien Sex, Aliens, Angst, Crossover, Espionage, Interspecies, Love, M/M, Psychological Torture, Rimming, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-05-30
Updated: 2011-06-20
Packaged: 2017-10-19 22:09:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 22,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allnuthatchforest/pseuds/ladderax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur is actually Nilor Premak, an alien <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardassian">Cardassian </a>spy in the 24th century sent on a mission to infiltrate a rebel group on Earth. En route, he gets thrown through a temporal anomaly and ends up in the 21st century. He's lucky enough to be rescued by a couple who take him in and give him a sense of purpose, but he still struggles with his homesickness, his need for love, and the mounting evidence against his belief that humans are somehow inferior to his traditionally nationalistic, xenophobic people, a people who pride themselves on their ruthlessness, cunning, and discipline.</p><p>On top of that, he finds himself unwillingly attracted to a human who may be able to give him everything a Cardassian lover could give him, and possibly more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the Iron and Wine song of the same name.
> 
> Warning: later chapters include torture and its aftermath.

It had been ten years since the mission had gone awry through no fault of his own or anyone else’s. Nilor and his superiors had worked assiduously to make him look human, to train him in human idioms and mannerisms. It was a relatively simple assignment: go to Earth, infiltrate the Maquis cell working there, and relay information about them to the head of the Order.

He had his alias: Arthur Hollander, ex-Starfleet cadet who’d been missing for the past two years. With the skin transplant, he looked enough like an older Hollander that no one would ask any questions. On the face of it, the worst that could go wrong was that he’d be discovered and killed by the Maquis. And that wasn’t even too horrifying a prospect. He was Cardassian, and he was Obsidian Order. It was better for it to happen sooner rather than later, while you were still young and still used to being uncomfortable and itching to prove yourself for the glory of Cardassia.

He never imagined that what happened might be worse than death.

He had caught a routine transport from Alpha Centauri, full of Starfleet officers back from shore leave. The assignment was only to last a year, but he was already sick of humans. They were like silly, loud birds, with their bright colors and graceless movements. They were always trying to have fun. They always wanted to be comfortable. Playing tonga, rushing off to the holosuites to jump around and roll in the dirt and act like children. Their lack of sense was no doubt part heredity, but he knew plenty of Cardassians who failed to discipline their minds.

He could have been among other Cardassians right now. If only Rochal had chosen him as a secretary to the replacement to the conveniently disappeared diplomatic attaché to Denobula. He could have been with Rochal himself, could have learned for certain exactly how Rochal felt about him. Though he was certain he knew anyway.

*

The last night they had spent together didn’t even have to be the last night. It was a night marred by the cold, damp winds that made even the most stoic look like they were about to whimper. As always, Rochal had declined his invitation to come to his module in Lakarian City; Nilor had to travel. He wore the light blue suit Rochal had complimented him on the first night they met as anything other than supervisor and junior operative.

Rochal had used the excuse that he had been told to stay as near the transport pad as possible, in case Tain needed him elsewhere in the system at short notice.

“It isn’t against the law for you to make an effort to see me,” Nilor had said once, instantly regretting how needy he sounded. “The entire order knows what Lok and Dejar are to each other, and as long as they keep their feelings separate from their work no one cares.”  
“People will overlook a lot from Lok,” Rochal answered calmly, “He’s got far more powerful friends than I do.”

Nilor never brought it up again.

There were times, though, when there was a fleeting look of unguarded tenderness in Rochal’s pale eyes. And after one of Nilor’s peers had been brutally executed by the Klingons, once—just once—Rochal had looked at Nilor with a brief expression of pain, then pressed a soft, gentle kiss to the faint ridge over his cheekbone. After that he had been exponentially colder.

A moment of sentimentality at losing one of our own. It had nothing to do with you in particular, he had written.

*

Nilor knew for sure, though, that he had everything he wanted. Rochal at least kissed him on the mouth, which was more than some of his friends’ lovers would do. Rochal reached around and jerked his cock when he fucked him, prepared him however briefly before he entered him. There was once or twice a kiss to the shoulder, once or twice a hand run down the sensitive spinal ridge before Rochal grabbed his hair and drove his thick cock into his ass.

As hard as Rochal tried to hide it, he was the best operative in his cell, the one Rochal trusted to be most thorough, most clever in his means of gathering information. If the older man was hard on him, Nilor thought, it was only because he wanted to make sure he didn’t go soft. It had been know to happen to operatives. Rochal was doing him a far bigger favor by ensuring that he stayed sharp and didn’t get too entitled.

And he was fortunate, if such a thing as fortune existed. Every relationship was a sort of training, and he was not being trained to be used to comfort, tenderness, romance. He was being trained to expect anything, to perform his duty in bed or in the field and then to move on to the next task with cold efficiency. Ultimately it would make him a better spy. A better Cardassian.


	2. Chapter 2

When it happened they were already in sight of Earth. The transport captain told them to sit and prepare for turbulence, that she would try to evade the giant-clam-shaped violet ripple in space. But it was no use.

They snagged the edge of it. It tore them into a maelstrom. He felt like he was pieces of thirty different bodies, each a different age and species and place. Everything was dizzy, blurred, like he was being volleyed back and forth between death and life and death and life again.   
.  
*

He must have been clinging to something. His hands were still crabbed as if gripping, and they would have ached immensely if everything else weren’t throbbing slowly and excruciatingly.

He’d forgotten how to identify times of day on Earth. The light here was cooler, brighter. It hurt his eyes. He was practically naked. His human skin was torn to shreds.

Grainy stuff clung to his face. He was wet. There was water trying to work its way through his cavernous wounds and into his body, and he was helpless. It was a hard thing for a Cardassian to admit.

His eyes were weak and unfocused, but he could see a house at the top of the slope up the beach. There was a slim Cardassianoid shape in the doorway. He willed it not to notice him.

Please. Just let me die with my pride.  
If there’s anything left of it.

To die in a human skin, thousands of lightyears from home, having done nothing for your country, with your friends and leaders and colleagues and enemies having no idea whether you’re alive or dead or how or why? He couldn’t think of a more meaningless death. There was no one at his side to perform the shri-tal. What would he have told them anyway? That he’d screamed like a Ferengi as the ship was pulled apart by a temporal paradox? That his feelings for his higher-ranking colleague were untoward, were a weakling’s, that he was incapable of accepting a proper education for what it was?

All his secrets hurt him much more than they’d ever hurt any of his enemies.

*

“Oh my god. Oh my god. Dom, come down here,” a woman was screaming. It was muffled by his exhaustion and the water in his ears.  
The woman was kneeling next to him. He could vaguely see smooth human skin of the lighter variety, curling dark hair, large eyes.  
Her hands hovered above him anxiously, hesitating to touch him.

“No doctors,” he croaked.  
“Oh, darling, what happened to you?” she begged.   
“Boat wreck.”

Now there was a man at the woman’s side, tall and fair-haired.   
“He said no doctors,” she whispered to the man, puzzled. “But I don’t see how we can help it. He’s not in good shape. He might have internal bleeding.”  
“If he said no doctors, then no doctors.”  
“Dom. Don’t be an idiot. I don’t even know why I’m asking you what to do about this. I’m calling the hospital.”  
“Mal, look.” He pointed past her, to where Nilor was making a nearly successful effort to pull himself to his feet. They stared at him, bewildered.  
“I’m fine,” he managed.   
“You are not fine,” Mal replied.   
“I will be.”

They paused and looked at each other.   
“Do you have a home? Anyone who can care for you?”  
“They’re a very long way from here,” he said, almost wanting to laugh.  
“Well, at least you can rest here for awhile,” the man said. “What’s your name?”   
“Arthur,” he said softly.

*

He could blame his lack of appetite on his injuries. But he had no idea how human food would ever not make him want to vomit. The young couple, Dom and Mal, cooked together—some sort of insipid white fish with herbs, bread, a round bitter-smelling vegetable. Nilor—or Arthur, it was now--could tell that they were uncomfortable around him. They hovered around him, offering him bread and applesauce and water after he declined the fish, and smiled broad fixed smiles. Arthur often saw them exchange significant glances, or move to whisper something in each others’ ears. It made sense. He was a strange man who had washed up on their beach, bleeding and asking not to go to the hospital. No doubt they thought he was some sort of criminal. He wondered if they’d call the police, wondered if he should run.

Plus, he’d been taught to act like a human of the 24th century. People acted differently. There were different idioms. Humans, at least humans here, seemed to move slower, to be more wary. They were still so trusting, though. No Cardassian he knew would ever take a stranger in in such a way.

They sat at the table together. He ate as they ate, cutting his bread with a knife and fork as they cut their fish. They appeared to be suppressing some amusement at him, and he couldn’t quite figure out why.

“So you’re married?” he asked them.  
“Three months at the beginning of August,” Mal answered, looking over at Dom.  
“And you? Where do you come from? Surely someone is looking for you right now.”  
No. Of course not. No one would be.

Even if someone wanted to find me, he thought, it would be dazzlingly foolish to send a Cardassian ship into Terran airspace. Or even to send someone on some pretense. Not when there are more important things to be done. Even when Tain himself was shipwrecked for two weeks on Castellon Prime, the orders were clear. He was not to be looked for.

The agents are expendable. The intelligence is not.

“I’ve got family in San Francisco,” he answered. “But no one else, really.”

*

He could hear them talking about him. The walls were thin and the windows open.   
“He didn’t ask if anyone else was safe,” Mal said. “Don’t you think that’s odd?”  
“Maybe there was no one else,” Dom answered.  
“You’re awfully confident that this strange young man is completely on the up and up,” she whispered loudly.   
“Why wouldn’t he be? The odds are pretty good. Besides, even if he is some unsavory character, he’s weak. He seems pretty helpless to me.”   
“Weak?” Mal huffed. “I hardly think so.”

*

He slowly went to sleep.

As he fell asleep he thought of Cardassia, unpopulated from space, covered in ochre sands and hot clouds. For a silly second he imagined he’d see it when he opened his eyes. That he’d be calmly floating, in a shuttlepod so slow it felt entranced, back toward a Lakarian City where there was no Rochal and no Tain and he would begin again with new handlers and new assignations. He would work a desk job in Lissepia, work as a bookkeeper to keep an eye on arms dealers. He’d be free to order yamok juice from the replicators, to argue for hours over which Order was most instrumental in winning the war with the Klingons, to be viciously irritable when he met a man he wanted in his bed.

He was conscious enough to identify that as the sentimental flak it was.


	3. Chapter 3

He spent the next five days watching television, lying on the soft couch.

It was always jarring to look into the mirror and see that face he couldn’t really call his own. Allegedly the shapes of all his features were the same. But the fins and ridges had been shaved off the nostrils and the bridge of the nose and the chin. His neck was scrawny, almost grotesque, without the thick ridges that ran alongside it.

He touched the side of his neck and shivered from a pleasure far out of context. He hadn’t expected it to still be so erotic. It was even more pleasurable now because the neck wasn’t protected by those ridges. The nerves that conducted that orgasmic frisson straight to his crotch were practically naked. And he felt ashamed. Having such a center of pleasure exposed was not enough unlike walking around with your cock out.

His hair was an embarrassing tangle. He picked up Mal’s black brush with animal hair bristles and jammed it through the knots, eventually able to brush it straight backwards. Now once again it was smooth, slick, straight, a Cardassian’s hair, his hair.

It flopped forward when he took his hand away. But at least he’d been able to see a glimpse of himself. And might be able to mistake himself for himself if he saw from far enough away.

*

It was time for him to go. He hated relying on strangers, especially human strangers. He had grown used to Mal’s singing, to Dom’s awkwardly re-learned piano playing, to the late-night sounds of metallic putterings in the small study. He’d even gotten slightly more accustomed to the nauseating food smells. But he had to face it. These people were primitives. They knew nothing of the universe. They were like ants on a leaf, too small to understand the shape of the leaf let alone of the tree it was on.

But where would he go from there? He had no idea how to make human money. He could work with technology, and maybe he could learn their simple machines.

Maybe he could broach the subject with Dom. Dom had been kind to him, especially if kindness was directly proportional to how few questions one asked. He had even been accommodating when Arthur felt he had slipped beyond all hope of repair. Once he had asked what nation-state they were in, and Dom looked amused. France, he answered.

Arthur had never heard of France.

Maybe Dom thought he had some kind of head injury, or that he was some sort of awkward feral child. Mal was the more cautious, but still kind. It was difficult to read her reactions when Arthur answered a question.

However evasive Arthur was, Dom and Mal were equally evasive when it came to talking about their work. They worked in the same field, they said, in a combination of architecture and psychology.

 

“I’m sorry to ask this,” he began one day as they ate lunch.

Humans always apologize, Rochal had told him. Especially when they mean it the least. They feel they should be the most ashamed of what they need the most.

He jabbed his fork into the spongy yellowish lump on his plate. Mal was staring directly at his plate, clearly measuring how much he ate and didn’t eat. He knew he was thin; he saw the black human veins through his wrist, and it scared him.

“Do you know anyone who’s hiring?”  
“I’m not in charge of hiring anyone,” Dom apologized. “I could talk to my boss, but really you need a lot of training for what we do.”  
“You could see if they need anyone to do paperwork,” Mal suggested, putting her hand over Dom’s.  
“I could.” This time he was the one sounding hesitant.  
“No, please, don’t bother. I was—“ What was the expression the man on the TV show had used? “I was just between jobs. That was why I decided I would take a boat out on my own. Nothing better to do.”  
“Have you thought of going back to San Francisco?” Mal asked.  
“Of course. I should do that.”

He stared out the window while he cleaned off his dish. The tide was low and clear, and ruddy small dogs nosed at shellfish on the dirt-dark beach. A storm seemed to be coming; the ugly white curtains flapped.

He might as well just retrace his steps, go back to where he'd come from and stay there. Let the currents take his jacket and his blood once and for all.

*

He was ready, ready to do one thing or the other. But whatever he did he couldn’t stay here. He removed Dom’s soft, baggy clothes, found the shredded coat and trousers that Mal had hung up in the empty guest closet at his request. It was well that they’d been so shredded, Arthur reflected, otherwise they would have looked profoundly odd to these people.

He opened the jacket, ready to slip into it. Then he noticed one seam a different color than the one opposite it. It was an old-fashioned, white seam with red thread binding it. But there was something strange about it, and Arthur of all people was trained to notice details.

The thread seemed to be weaving an erratic pattern. To the untrained eye it merely looked like a poor sewing job. There was one long stitch, then a short stitch, then a double stitch, then a long stitch again, then a triple stitch, then a stitch skewed slightly diagonal.

He recognized it then at once. It was an old code system, one of the first taught to young children. He hadn’t used it in decades, but he would never forget how to read it.

This was a message.  
 _ _Under the black awning, thirty hours.__

"Under the black awning" was a line from a poem.  
On the surface it was about contemplating the countryside from beneath the titular black awning; the poet exhibited more sangfroid than most Cardassian poets who sang of anything besides the glory of Cardassia, and that was saying quite a lot. The aesthetic, and the ethic, was to appear as though nothing was too important, as though one was apologizing for even writing about something of so little consequence. The real theme, in short, was unattachment.

But if you examined the Black Awning poem, it began to trouble you. It was so noncommittal as to seem like a parody. It was straining for its callousness. It was so vague, so full of empty space, so inclined to begin a nod to the familiar objects of the genre and then to drop it abruptly in an apparent lack of interest—the poem had gained a reputation for being one of the modern canon’s most chilling expressions of passion and despair. Nilor had shown the poem once to Rochal, who read it at a glance and had said nothing.

A mention of time usually referred to a word or a letter. The thirtieth letter of the Kardasi alphabet was—no. No. It couldn’t be. He would never.

It could be a trick. He sincerely hoped it was just a practical joke.  
Or a jab at his expense. Rochal reminding him that he, Nilor, would always be the one who stood under black awnings.  
It was least likely to mean what he most wished and feared and dreaded it did.

Thankfully. He had no reason then to sit on the edge of the bed with his jacket beneath his elbows, weeping into his hands like a human child until he felt his throat would invert. At least, therefore, it wasn’t happening for a reason. And that was a comfort.

*

Arthur never slept as well as he did that first night. Cardassians needed less sleep in general. But he felt he couldn’t afford to waste time. He read. He planned.

He had no idea why he was hoping to start a life in this world and time. It would only ever be half a life. If that. A tragically attenuated life, bound by gravity, among dim, trusting people with whom he shared no histories or loyalties.

Sometimes it hit him with an embalming flood of horror that even his own people were not his people at this point. They had only failed thus far at conquering worlds. There were still strong pockets of rebellion, people who wished to be only their continents or their nation-states and not Cardassians. The man he loved and hated so much was not even born yet. He might not ever be born, if even the slightest nudge could change history. And then his suffering was even more foolish. Love for a ghost, a fiction.

So Nilor Premak was alone in the galaxy. It sounded so melodramatic.

He was the only one for centuries who would know what he knew, things that were so simple and so common to know in his own place and time. He had been clinging to the idea of his loyalty, to the thought that no matter what he was, he was always an agent of the Obsidian Order.

And the Obsidian Order did not exist.  
The people he served were worse than dead, they were ova inside ova inside ova. He put his faith in unborn children.

And no ship appeared in a rift in the sky. No transporter dissolved him back onto a Cardassian vessel, safe and sound; and, Nilor Premak had to accept (the sooner the better; his were a pragmatic people) that none ever would.

*

Something in the house was not right.

Arthur knew the usual sounds of Dom and Mal in the study. These were not their sounds. These sounds hesitated, created an uneven pattern of silence and disturbance.

Without thinking further he sprang out of bed.

The door was ajar. A figure in gray clothing was rifling through a cabinet. It was never aware of Arthur coming up behind it, silently as he was trained, and driving his fist into a deadly pressure point in the throat while wresting both of the intruder’s arms backward with his other arm. The man groaned in agony and shock. He had likely never been handled by anyone so strong before. Arthur could easily choose to adjust the pressure only slightly and snap both of the man’s humeri.

He kicked the back of the man’s thighs and sent his legs out from under him. In one swift move he broke his nose, sending its shards up into the man’s skull; he fell to the side, eyes empty, bleeding from the sockets.

Mal and Dom had come running; they stood in the doorway shocked as Arthur inspected the intruder for any signs of life.

“I found him looking through your cabinets,” he explained nonchalantly. “Do you know him?”  
“Never seen him.” Dom strode to the cabinet and felt around for a silver case. He took it out and opened it, glanced over its contents, felt them, and, satisfied, closed it.  
“How did you knock him out like that?” Mal sounded horrified. "I barely heard anything until he fell."  
“I’ve had…training. Military training.”  
“You didn’t say anything about that,” Dom posited, confused.  
“I didn’t feel a need. It’s over. That part of my life ended.”  
“Well, Arthur,” Dom said, somewhat nervous and also somewhat pleased, “I may have a job for you after all,”

*

“Mal said I should tell you first that what I do…she tries to stay separate from that part of it…is sometimes sort of…in the gray areas of legality. And we certainly get involved with a lot of people who are well past the gray area. Not ideal, but it’s the nature of the business.”  
“I don’t even care. Really. I don’t think I could care if I tried.”

And Arthur must have seemed so weary, so ground down, so completely without the luxury of principles, that Dom had no choice but to believe him.


	4. Chapter 4

It could have been awkward. 

Not fatal perhaps, after all Dom had overlooked before: there was the time Dom had walked in on him in his kitchen putting live guppies in a blender, which Arthur had explained away as part of some new pH-balancing diet popular in Finland; and the time when he had referred to the Sun as “your sun”; and a hundred other little idiosyncrasies and knowledge gaps which Arthur, horrified, had always rushed to correct. 

But the appearance of a smirking reptilian humanoid stalking toward them, high-tech plasma weapon in hand, would have provoked some questions.

Arthur quickly conjured up a Kalashnikov and fired forty rounds into his father.

Gul Premak staggered backwards, writhing, for a few very long milliseconds. At first Arthur fired into his armored breastplate, which easily deflected the spray. Then he fired at Premal’s neck, and he swayed in place before finally collapsing. 

Thankfully the dream was only a practice run. They were only in Nash’s mind. Things could have gotten messy if a mark’s projections had caught onto a literal alien in their midst. Cobb and Nash were too busy arguing over the layout of the terraces in a Colonial garden; the rattle of gunfire alerted Cobb, but, confident that Arthur had the situation under control, he turned back around, muttering something about a central axis walk plan. 

Absorbed as his colleagues were in their work, Arthur almost regretted killing Gul Premak before speaking with him. He wasn’t naïve or soft-hearted enough to believe that the projection really was his father. 

But he was perhaps naïve and soft-hearted enough to want at least to hear a Cardassian voice. 

Even if that voice was probably just going to taunt him about his human face or his desperation to learn everything he could about 21st century Terran culture, perhaps as much for knowledge’s sake as for survival’s. Reminding him that, even though without realizing it he still instinctually gathered information for his superiors in the Order, it was the instinct of mateless Rigovian parrots building empty nests in the tar-trees and croaking mournfully out to nothing. 

 _You failed, Nilor,_  his father would say, far more scornfully than Gul Premak would ever say in life. As Cardassian military men went, Premak was not an especially cruel father. Nilor was his only son, quick, bright, and stoic, and the elder Premak had often spoken of the high hopes he had for him. Had. 

 _Give up. You’ll never be Cardassian again. Others will complete the mission you could not do. Others will take the place that was meant for you in the Order. Remember Farlak, the one you always called a misty-eyed ragdoll? He was promoted to Phalanx Supervisor. That should have been you, Nilor. You might have been a great man, but it is impossible to be Cardassian except among Cardassians.  
_  
He might have fired then.

*

This kind of thing didn’t happen to Arthur. It hadn’t ever happened in the past, except when he’d first begun dreaming, but he quickly learned to use his Order mind-control techniques to suppress the projections. Was he losing his discipline? 

It was said that unwanted projections didn’t generally show up unless the sleeper was under a lot of emotional stress. And things were going well. Relatively well, at least, considering the circumstances. He had work he enjoyed. He liked Dom, and Mal, and even grew to respect them. He found that humans could sometimes be clever and observant, and, working with Dom and Mal, wondered if the Cardassian prejudice against both sexes’ working in the sciences had somehow put them at a disadvantage against the Federation. It turned out that men did have scientific acumen after all. 

And he spent a fair amount of time with Dom and Mal’s now-two-year old child, a buoyant, pinkish thing with a fascination for all things crawling. He told her simplified and thinly disguised Cardassian myths: the viper who learned to sew, the vole who suppressed a mutiny, the children who built a home on the sun. 

Cardassians were generally fond of children, even if they were only human children with insectlike memories and a tendency more to histrionics than to cunning. Perhaps it was just that their parents didn’t expect enough from them. He had suggested this to Dom once. (It wasn’t received well.)

So he was fine. Eating, sleeping, working, interacting (mostly) civilly. There was nothing that would cause his Cardassian subconscious to feel so betrayed that it would stomp through a copse of quinces and denounce him for going native.

Well, except for that one thing. 

*

That one thing was now en route to Warsaw from Montevideo, and its name was Henry Eames. 

He had met Eames about a year ago. He’d heard of him before then, of course; the legendary Eames, the only man in the business capable of a truly seamless forgery. 

No one knew exactly why, but forgery was nigh-impossible even for the most skilled dreamers. 

Dom had told him that Eames had attempted forgery in a way no one else had. He had come upon his method because of embarrassing necessity; like most fairly new dreamers, he was confronted by projections of people from his past, people he didn’t quite want traipsing in while he was hunting for safe codes and plans for mob hits. So it occurred to him to anticipate his projections before they manifested, and to project them onto his own body. 

That could have been dangerous; the psyche of the projection could have melded with his own, and it could have taken over his will, led him to lose touch with reality. But this didn’t happen. He used a mirror when shifting forms, to ground him. To remind himself that the projection was only a facade, something he controlled, that moved only when he moved. And Arthur was immediately fascinated. The man had to have an incredibly disciplined mind to manage such a thing. 

Arthur assumed immediately that if this Eames could forge, so could he.   

*

The last time he tried to forge, he sat in front of an old art deco vanity and watched his face turn a wan pink, then grey, then a frightening deep yellow.

“You’re scared of losing control of it, aren’t you,” said a young girl with long red hair, coming to sit on the bench beside him. “Scared of having it take over. If you don’t get over that, you’ll never do it right. You’ll always just keep turning colors, and that’s it.”  
“Is that right?” he said, in his best human-talking-to-children voice, the voice he’d picked up from Dom and Mal and their friends when trying to placate children who thought they knew best. “Well, why don’t you tell me how you do it?”  
“Are you someone’s dad?” the girl asked. “You talk like someone’s dad.”  
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” he said, trying to smile lightheartedly.  
“Well, it’s silly when you’re hardly more than a little boy yourself,” she replied, gazing up at him with lips pursed and eyes unblinking.   
“You’ve got quite a lot of sass for someone who isn’t real, who’s just a part of my own mind.”   
“And you’re quite sure about that?” a much deeper voice teased.

To his shock, the girl was no longer a girl but an adult male; young, fair, sturdily built. He smiled a closed-mouthed smile at Arthur, and offered his hand.  
“You must be Cobb’s sleek little Pinscher. Arthur, is it? I’m-“  
“Eames, right?”  
“That’s right.” Eames shook his hand, then dropped it coolly.   
“I apologize. I thought you were a projection.”  
“Well, that was sort of the point.”   
“You’re….” He wanted to compliment Eames on his extraordinary ability, but his pride swatted his gracious impulses away. He’d been trained in mental discipline since he was three. And this swaggering, poorly-shaven human just sat in front of a mirror and could do something he couldn’t? “Do you do that kind of thing a lot?”  
“What kind of thing?”  
“Barging in on peoples’ dreams, messing with them like that? Just for fun? It’s a really fucking bad way to introduce yourself to the people who are supposed to trust you for the next week.”  
“And what business are you in again?” Eames laughed dryly, looking at Arthur simperingly in the mirror.   
“I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that you—“  
“I’m sure. You’re probably just incapable of not taking everything deathly seriously, and if someone likes to have a little more fun with it, then you pull out your crossing-guard badge.”   
“That’s not the issue.”  
“Do you even know the issue, or do you just like to act like a puffed-up little ass?”  
“I don’t even—“  
“Well, I’ll see you later, Arthur. I’m glad our professional relationship’s gotten off to such a good start.” Eames smirked, pressed a small revolver to his temple, and pulled the trigger. 

*

To Eames’s credit, he was not the type of man to hold a grudge. More accurately, maybe, he didn’t let the grudge get in the way of working closely together on the DiMello extraction case. Arthur had worked with architects and chemists and extractors who would sometimes refuse to work with someone with whom they’d had a disagreement, or would treat them with glowering silence. Eames didn’t even seem to remember that he’d called Arthur a puffed-up little ass or that he’d walked off mid-conversation for reasons Arthur could only guess had to do with frustration and disdain. 

But Eames didn’t exactly treat Arthur with disdain. Not always. Sometimes he gave Arthur a co-conspiratorial look when one of their associates was prating about insignificant details like the exact color of a rooster’s wattle. Sometimes he solicited Arthur’s opinion with an interest he might even mistake for warmth. Other times he was defensive, taking all of Arthur’s suggestions as personal slights. Arthur admitted to himself that sometimes he could be a little abrasive. But he was only trying to keep everyone sharp. 

Arthur would have been thrown quite off balance. If such behavior didn’t remind him so thoroughly of home. 

*

You’re just seeing what you want to see, Arthur chastised himself. He lay in the hotel bed, cold forcing him to stiffen and curl into himself, his hand gripping his spent cock as if it were tugging a troublesome dog by the scruff. 

It always happened this way. He crawled into bed at night—oh, those painfully soft, back-bending human beds—and tried to keep preparing for tomorrow’s work. He ran through the possible scenarios they’d face in the mark’s mind. But those possible scenarios often involved the team’s forger. And there he’d get stuck.

Instead of imagining hostile projections surrounding Eames, he imagined only Eames himself. He thought with wonder and envy of all the possible transfigurations of his form; imagined the man turning into an infant, a beautiful woman, an Algolian falcon as that shapeshifter on Terok Nor did. But he lighted only briefly on each of these forms. It was Eames’s face he returned to every time. His sharp, curious gray eyes. His impossibly full mouth. 

He couldn’t ignore the idea of kissing that mouth until it almost couldn’t close. 

Maybe it would be terrible. Maybe humans kissed without any skill. Then, Eames lacked so much of the equipment necessary for erotic play. What would sex be without the engorged neck ridges, without the friction of fin against fin? What was a chest without the loop at the collarbone, which could be mouthed and licked and breathed upon until your lover nearly wept in anticipation?

 _But he could...  
_ _No. Absolutely not.  
_  
He tried to convince himself that it would be unappealing, putting his lips on a human man’s neck, his back, his chest. But he’d been in his human skin too long. At least before he met Eames, he’d grown comfortable with touching himself, making his cock spurt just by running his fingertips gently over that nerve that ran from collarbone to ear.

And if his human body felt touchable, felt open and aching to being stroked at every joint and crease, then the aching for other human bodies was not far behind.

He imagined leaning over Eames in bed, feeling the heat map of his body. He imagined taking one of his nipples into his mouth to wake the man up, kissing it, sucking it, drawing it into a peak gently while stimulating the other with light pinches and strokes. He imagined feeling Eames’s body shift beneath him, his powerful chest muscles stretching, his hand coming down to massage the back of Arthur’s neck, warming him, encouraging him. 

After these fantasies, after he’d groaned and arched and shot his load into the damp-smelling bedsheets, he felt like a fool. He’d wipe himself off. He’d shower. He’d recite the Thirteenth Code of Tret Akleen.

 _…To lie with an alien is to become an alien, in the eyes of the law, and the eyes of your countrymen…_


	5. Chapter 5

“Arthur, look,” Eames called gaily.  
“Is it important?” Arthur grumbled. “I think I already know the answer, but what is it?”

They were practicing, preparing for another extraction case. A mob boss wanted to know if one of his caporegimes had turned FBI informant. Eames was forging the capo’s youngest daughter, a bright, ebullient girl and the man’s most trusted confidant.

He’d already seen Eames in her skin, and it was, as usual, an eerie simulacrum. He had the lively eyes and pensive smile Arthur had seen when he observed and taped her drinking cappuccinos at her favorite café in Providence. He held his cigarette at the same angle, pulled at his lip when stressed like she did. And it was hard to get a face to obey you. They had wills of their own. They required obedience training, just like wompats and Earth dogs. It had taken Nilor Premak months to approximate human facial expressions, just to understand the whys and wherefores and to account for the strange new weight of that skin.

Arthur knew that dreams cast a Gaussian veil over everything, heightened any sense of beauty, made the imperfect and inaccurate look more real than the real itself. But he was still in awe.

The awe never shook, even when he was awake, even when it should have been shaken. So much for discipline.

 

“Well?” Eames asked, turning around, allowing Arthur to look at himself.

To his horror, Eames-Arthur was wearing not the outfit Arthur was wearing today, well-fitting trousers and an oxford with a cabled black cardigan, but one he’d worn son their first job together. The khaki pants were too baggy, especially at the crotch, and the polo shirt was a loud orange. It was a poor approximation of Dom’s old clothing, before he’d really understood what someone his age and in his position ought to wear.

He’s mocking me, the bastard, Arthur seethed.

“Mr. Eames,” he said, stalking over and leaning next to Eames’s ear, “next time, instead of attempting to unsettle me by ridiculing my clothing or being so childish as to forge my appearance, I would appreciate it if you would express your contempt for me openly. So that we could resolve our problems like men instead of sitcom characters.”

Eames imitated the tight press of Arthur’s lips after he had finished a sentence he thought particularly profound, like a smug facial full-stop. He tipped his chin in the air, set his shoulders, looked utterly supercilious as he turned back towards the mirror.

“Arthur,” Eames droned, “this paranoid Sideshow Bob routine of yours was sweet, but it’s getting boring. Do you really think you’re so important to me that I sit at home making a list of ways to get under your skin? Please, do calm down, so that we can finish this and get home. Allright?”

Arthur just glared at him and walked away, ready for the kick. He knew that part of the reason he could be so witheringly hostile to Eames, or so dismissive, depending on the circumstance, was because he didn’t want to know what Eames looked like when he was kind. And he didn’t want to offer himself, in friendship or otherwise, and be turned away.

A Cardassian didn’t expose his or her innermost needs, at least without ulterior motives. And for him there were none. He wanted all those things he didn’t want, wanted them desperately.

Of course, the irony of it was that by showing Eames his hostility and irritation, he was acting exactly like a Cardassian in love. If they were on Cardassia, he’d be laughed at for acting so meltingly lovesick.

*

He didn’t see Eames for two years after that. In the meantime, he learned what Sideshow Bob was. He learned how not to use so much pomade. He learned to stop biting blood out of his knuckles while waiting for some slow, grainy image to spring out of the glacial welter of the Earth’s Internet (Cardassia, he noted with sad pride, had already had neural interfaces for 200 years while humans were still struggling with this Google shit.)

He castigated himself sometimes for not trying everything he could try. He had read reports of time-stranded people occasionally getting off of primitive planets by using atomic power to reopen the rifts that had stranded them. But how would he even be able to locate the rift? He’d tried to build an astrometric computer once, in his small rented apartment in Boston; he failed absurdly. The components didn’t even exist yet on Earth, or hadn’t been refined. And then, even with his connections in the criminal underground, the idea of getting an atomic weapon for himself was laughable.

Perhaps a more audacious agent, a better agent, would have tried.

He didn’t feel particularly audacious, especially after Mal died. Dom was gutted, razed, a grey spectre of himself made even more spectral by the stress of running. After what Dom had done for him, it was all he could do to make sure that the man ate.

He wasn’t sure he understood human grief. Cardassians took death seriously, certainly; they mourned their dead. They avenged their dead when necessary. But death was a joyous event when someone died in the service of the state or passed peacefully after a long life of such service. He’d seen some among his people become unhinged, those of them who took a loved one’s death as a personal slight rather than the necessary and unavoidable event it was, but they were the exception to those who accepted death calmly.

Well, Dom’s grief was complicated, too, by his loss of his children. That was something Arthur could understand mourning. To lose control of the education of one’s children was akin to a death on Cardassia. And Arthur enjoyed taking part in that education too. He’d longed, absurdly, to teach James and Phillippa Kardasi, so he would have someone to speak it with who would ask no questions, at least at first.

And he’d been fond of Mal. She was a shrewd woman. She had a curious mind, and she never trusted without proof. Arthur would not have minded one more conversation with her, her hands animated and her eyes shining, in the airy kitchen of that old cottage on the beach. Even if it had to be infused with the wretched smell of human bread baking.

*

He’d been selfish. Dom needed a forger, and he’d tried to dissuade him, just because he didn’t particularly want to remember how he’d felt about that man. What happened to duty? The nation-state governments of this world were inefficient, backwards, not worth serving, so Arthur was fortunate he’d found someone worthy of loyalty.

But he remembered how jarring it had been, seeing Eames animating his own face. His face that wasn’t his. The eyes he’d had since birth looking out from a mask of flat, putty-colored human skin.

What had perhaps bothered him the most was not the haughty expression Eames had imitated. What had bothered him was the flash he’d caught in those eyes, a brief but unmistakable look of distance, of tired lostness.

Was I imagining it?

He’d tried to avoid provoking Eames during this job. He hadn’t had the energy to, and he preferred his new ability to appear more seamlessly lighthearted and affable without overdoing it. (One of his higher-ups in the order, one Garak, was quite a master of overdoing it. And it could be charming and useful. But this wasn’t the place.) He’d even told Eames that he was impressed, which the other man had interpreted as condescension. Fine.

Now it was over. Dom was returning to his children.

Arthur didn’t have an excuse to follow him. He’d been Dom’s partner in illegal extraction, his protector when he was on the run, but now he was more than experienced, could work on his own, could live on his own.

He stood in the terminal, lacking the resolve even to push his trolley forward. Money wasn’t the issue. He could afford to buy separate homes in five separate cities, including Tokyo. But at the very least he didn’t know which of the five to buy first.

“Taking a nap? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that you slept standing up,” Eames said, coming up behind him.  
“No, I’m just—“ He didn’t know what he was just.  
“So where’s home?”  
“Oh—Boston,”  
“You sure about that?” Eames asked.  
“Well, it’s a strange thing not to be sure about,” Arthur replied lethargically.  
“It’s much less strange than you’d think,” said Eames. “Well, at the very least you should eat first.”  
“I probably should.”  
“Well, that’s a start. Come on then.” Eames beckoned him to follow. He couldn’t really stop himself.

*

Oh no. He couldn’t let Eames see him eat.

It wasn’t that he ate strangely anymore. He’d learned when to use a knife and fork and when it was acceptable to eat with one’s hands. The problem was that he still hadn’t gotten over his dislike of most Earth foods, and now that he knew that Eames could read his face, he was certain that he’d catch on to how subtly disgusted he must look as he chewed.

If Eames knew, though—which Arthur was sure he did—he didn’t say anything as they ate in the restaurant of the Chateau Marmont. In fact, he really didn’t say much of anything.

Arthur despaired. Perhaps he and Eames really had nothing to say to each other.

“Mr. Eames,” he asked, finally, after minutes upon minutes of excruciating near-silence, “what do you think of aliens?”

“Aliens?” Eames asked amusedly, empty fork tines lingering on the edges of his soft lips. It looked a bit like a tease. “Like, do they exist?”

“Well, that.”  
“I think if they do exist they’re nothing we would even recognize. They probably look like chairs, or cactuses, or salad. No, Mr. Hollander, I think the closest we’ll ever come to meeting aliens is exploring our own minds.”

Arthur wanted to laugh.

“What do you think? Are we destined to be pulling green-skinned birds from space before the century’s up?”

“Oh, no green-skinned women for me, thank you,” Arthur tried to sound nonchalant.

The check arrived.

“I’m thinking of staying in LA for a few days,” Eames offered casually, putting his credit card down. “If you’re still not sure where you’re going, maybe you should stay around. It seems like a good place to be in limbo.“

*

He had really no idea how it happened.

They’d ended up checking into the same hotel—different suites, of course—and after drinks in the bar Eames had offered to escort him home, making jokes about chivalry. Eames was a bit buzzed—Arthur would even have gone so far as to say he was drunk. Arthur was not.

Of course. It would have taken twenty more bottles of that whiskey to get Arthur even tipsy. The whole not human thing.

Eames had begun making jokes that Arthur was a nerd, and that the only way to get in his pants was to seduce him with alien movies. Arthur had made weak protests, but Eames had sat himself down on the huge taupe leather couch in the suite’s living room, flicked on the TV, and begun scrolling through the list of Pay-Per-View movies.

“Ooh, Predators. You’ll like this one, Arthur. Hopefully you’ll like it enough to let me..”

He leaned over towards Arthur, and Arthur pulled away.

“Eames, you’re so drunk.”

“Not so drunk I can’t appreciate a good Predator. Takes one to know one, I guess,” he smiled.

“Oh, stop. Please, please stop.” Arthur stood up.

“So what, you’re suddenly not attracted to me?”

“Who said I was attracted to you?”

“Everything about you said you were attracted to me downstairs. The way you smiled at me? The way you looked at me? Jesus, I’d been waiting six years for any indication that there was a human being under there and not some sad robot.”

“Eames, you are so drunk. Robots don’t get sad.”

“They don’t? And you’re an authority on robots?”

“Of course not! I don’t know anything about robots!”

“You are so adorable right now. I never thought I’d actually hear myself say that, but you are.”

“Eames—“

“Have you ever heard the story of the weeping princess? No, no, let me finish. It’s a story I heard when I was a kid. In a faraway kingdom—you know the kind—a king had a beautiful daughter who cried all the time. And he sent out a decree that he would split his kingdom with the young man who could make his daughter stop crying. If they failed, of course, they’d be executed. So all these cocky young lads, they come out, thinking, how hard can it be to make a girl smile? They do all sorts of things—make jokes, do stunts, buy her imitation Burberry—and she just keeps crying. Finally, one of the boys says he knows exactly how to make the young thing stop crying, and may he please borrow the king’s scepter.  
The king’s reluctant, but he hands it over. And the kid says, Your Highness, I’m about to end your misery. And then he brings the scepter down over her head. And her head cracks open, with a dull metal thud. And all these gears pop out. See, she was a robot. A sad robot.”

“And this has what to do with me?”

“You were my sad robot. I was always trying to get some sort of reaction out of you, trying to make you laugh, or at least make you angry. And then angry wasn’t good enough. When it was over, you still had that distant look in your eyes. Oh, Arthur--”

Eames was looking into his eyes, suddenly, and tentatively touching the back of his fingers to Arthur’s cheek. He must have been looking especially weak at that moment to elicit such an urgent reaction.

“Don’t feel sorry for me. Just fuck me,” Arthur snapped.

Eames looked surprised.

“Yes, your highness.”

*

Eames leaned in and was kissing him.

It was so soft and relentless, the pulsing of those wildly overgrown lips. Eames’s hand cupped the top of his arm gently, and his other hand was on the back of Arthur’s neck.

Arthur felt the alien follicles on the back of his neck thrill at the contact. He wanted to throw his entire surface area around Eames at once, overwhelm him, give every touch receptor on his body way too much to process.

“Please,” he heard himself saying. “Yes. Oh.”

“Yeah?” Eames said softly, his eyes dazed and gentle. “You really want me?”

“I do,” Arthur said. “Really. I really fucking do.”

“Oh, God,” Eames moaned, and touched his lips to Arthur’s neck.

It was like an explosive went off in his skin.

Pleasure ripped through that naked nerve, radiating to his shoulder and face and the back of his head. His eyes squeezed shut, trying to focus, trying to maintain some control. And Eames just kept kissing him there. Kept kissing him there, hot, satiny mouth stroking the most vulnerable part of him.

He had to tell him to stop. He couldn’t tell him to stop.

And then it was too late. He was coming in his pants, feeling the wetness and the hot shame. He felt exposed.

“Arthur?” Eames asked. “Are you allright?”

He leapt away from Eames, standing up.

“This was a mistake. You have to go.”


	6. Chapter 6

_Cardassia_

The other three agents left the warehouse. Only Garak stayed behind, head tilted downward, apparently concerned with some miniscule flaw in the weave of his teal jacket. Nilor thought nothing of it and made to follow the others out into the hot iodine-hued dusk.

But the door slid shut before he could walk through it.

“What—“ Nilor turned around to face Garak, who was now fixing him with that famously unwavering interrogator’s gaze. Nilor himself had not quite perfected that gaze. Nor had he perfected the art of not buckling beneath it. To an untrained eye, maybe. But Garak would be able to detect the diffidence in every tiny motion.

“Stay away from him, Nilor,” Garak said, in a rather menacing tone.

Nilor knew he was talking about Rochal, but he couldn’t be sure if it was meant to be a warning against fraternizing with superiors, or a signal that he wanted Rochal for himself.

“You think that he will cure you of your weakness, make you ruthless,” Garak continued. “But I’ve seen the downfall of men like you before. He breaks you, but you don’t become more efficient. You become cruel for cruelty’s sake, which wastes so many resources, so much time. No, Mr. Premak. Maybe another man could handle it, but you can’t.”

“So, Garak, you’re telling me I’m just supposed to roll over and accept my _weakness_? That’s not what I was taught. That’s not what you told me before.”

Garak circled him slowly, then stood close at his side so that he could whisper as inaudibly as possible. His gaze was cold, falconish. To the cameras, this probably looked like a routine tongue-lashing, or perhaps a flirtation.

“Surely you also remember my teaching you that are few absolutes in this universe, Mr. Premak. That you have to look at the actual situation. What is there, rather than the principles about what should be there. Maxims are fine, but what works to keep the plebeians of Torr Sector obedient is different from what is necessary to survive in the Obsidian Order. Remember that.”

“So what should I do about my _weakness_ , then?” Nilor asked bitterly.

“Nothing,” Garak responded calmly. “As Sileb said, ‘The man who defeats nine enemies out of ten does more for himself and his nation than the man who makes himself weak by fighting the one unbeatable enemy.’”

“He said that?”

“No,” Garak said, a bit roguishly. “I just made it up. But I thought it would be more convincing to attribute it to someone famous.”

Nilor laughed, a humorless bark.

“So I should be sentimental, let my emotions rule me? Move to Risa and play house with a Betazoid?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Garak. “But be careful. Don’t be proud. Don’t destroy yourself because you think you should be able to handle it. You’re a beautiful young man, Nilor. You’re patriotic, clever, well-connected. There are other…options.” He said the last part matter-of-factly, with no hint of innuendo, which almost disappointed Nilor.

But it would be dangerous being Garak’s lover. He might grudgingly accept romantic weakness, but Tain would not. And where Garak was, Tain would invariably be.

“Go home,” Garak suggested nonchalantly. “Get some rest. Read a holonovel. Study your grammars. Something to take your mind off of all of this.”

The door slid open. Nilor took his leave with a nod of the head.

*

Cardassia City at twilight. Fifty cubits to the nearest transport. From here, in this grid of flat-topped black warehouses, it was almost impossible to see the vista evoked by the word _city_ : the talon-like administrative buildings shadowing the streets, the terraced pedestrian walkways where the upper classes could look down upon the rest. Each warehouse looked practically the same, and at this hour there was little sentient traffic. A few discreet survey bots glided into slots in the buildings. Voles scuttled across the claustrophobic pathways. Here and there were some orphan children, weak and hungry, trying to work the access codes to the doors, or to climb up the slippery sides to the roofs.

“Spare a lek, sir?” a child too old to be missing so many teeth asked him. The child’s skin was creased, his eyes sunken. He wore a jacket easily ten times too big for him— _wore_ was not the word so much as _trailed from his arms like bladderwrack._

Nilor wondered where the sudden twinge of empathy came from. Beggar children were a part of the scenery on Cardassia. It was foolish to take in foundlings, Tret Akleen had taught, when the safety of one’s own flesh and blood was hardly a guarantee. Cardassia Prime was hardly a resource-rich world.

And it wasn’t like Nilor himself had ever been a foundling. He’d been the beloved only child of Lenel and Mirsat Premak—loved perhaps a bit too much, some said, for him to ever toughen up properly. But he’d certainly not been raised to have compassion for orphans. If they’re of strong enough stuff, they’ll make something of themselves, his mother had explained as they walked through the marketplace one afternoon.

 _The marketplace. I should go,_ Nilor thought, paying his toll and stepping onto the transport. _I need bed dust and vole poison._ He watched the warehouses turn into a thick black streak and disappear, replaced by the stout sparkling cisterns of the artisan quarters. _Should get off here. _Then an abrupt shriek of metal going wrong, and the transport crashed into a wall that hadn’t been there.__

 _He was aware only briefly of the feeling of being thrown backwards._

 _*_

 _“Arthur? Arthur, what the fuck,” a female voice cried, in 21st century English. He opened his eyes. _Arthur. Oh. Right. That sad little human I can’t quite stop being.__

A young woman with shoulder-length brown hair in a red coat. There was a tall man behind her, glancing over her shoulder. _Her name was…fuck, what was her name?_

“Ariadne. What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” she asked, horrified. “Forgive me if I’m overreacting, but I’ve seen too much go wrong in this…line of work…to take this lightly.”

“Take what lightly?” He was groggy. The light hurt his eyes, and that agonizing headache was right back where he’d left it. How long ago was that, even?

“I’ve been calling you for almost a month. You told me you were coming to Paris and that you’d be in this apartment indefinitely, and I didn’t think you were the type to not answer your phone. I figured I’d come by, ask the doorman if he’d seen you around. He said you’d gone into the apartment, but that no one had seen you come out. So, crook that I am, I got in touch with some people and had them break in. And I find this. Arthur, how long has it been?”

“If the doorman said he hadn’t seen me in twenty-eight days...” he answered weakly. "I did specifically ask them to disregard any unusual behavior patterns. I asked them quite nicely."

“Oh. Wonderful. You too. I’m sure that you’re going through some shit, and I’m sorry, but you of all people should know that this isn’t the way to deal with it.”

“I know. Believe me, I know.” He tried to avoid her eyes.

“Hey.” She touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry if I’ve been harsh. But I really didn’t go into this business to be anybody’s mother.”

“I’m sorry. I guess that’s what happens when you’re working with a bunch of fucked-up people who have a dangerously seductive conduit to the imagination. I was foolish.”

“Or maybe I just haven’t lived long enough to become tragically fucked up. Who knows, in ten years I might become the most fucked-up person in this entire business.” She smiled wanly.

“I somehow don’t see that happening.” He struggled briefly to stand upright, then dusted himself off, willing himself to ignore the pain in his head.

“I'm going to need a few minutes to adjust," he said, shielding his eyes from the lamplight, "but if you don’t still want to kill me, would you like to have dinner?”

*

They ate at a small café outdoors, watching the twilight dog-walkers and couples on dates walk by. Ariadne made a joke about the voluminous trousers that were in fashion for women, and Arthur managed a smile, although he still couldn’t quite see what distinguished them from the other clothes humans wore. He was lucky he had a tailor who did that job for him.

Ariadne ate vegetarian quiche and talked about her latest invention, a sentient dream-building that could anticipate the needs of its inhabitants.

“There are a couple of us working in Dream AI now,” she explained excitedly, swallowing several mouthfuls of red wine in a row. “Dream robots could teach us how real-world robots might work, might allow us to anticipate problems with them and work out the kinks.”

“Aren’t projections sort of like robots already?” he asked, trying to pretend that a sickly sweet pink liquid—cassis?--was remotely palatable. He knew it was a dismally stupid question, but his headache was once again making it difficult to concentrate.

“A little, maybe. But we can’t control how they act. If we can build a dream robot—imagine all the possibilities for extraction. We could create teams that could blend in but at a moment’s notice take on entire armies of militarized projections. Maybe then we wouldn’t even need forgers.”

“One can only hope,“ he said, forcing a smile.

After they ate, he walked Ariadne home, promising her that he’d call her tomorrow and that he wouldn’t do anything stupid. Anything else stupid, at least.

*

He stared at the PASIV. What would it matter, he wondered, if he just went back? Ten days, fifteen days, a month? It was the only thing that got rid of the headaches. Before he’d left Cardassia, they’d given him an allergy shot. Only a year or two’s worth, all he should have needed. But there were so many irritants in the Earth’s atmosphere to which a Cardassian had no immunity. The headaches would come on suddenly; they felt as if his face and eye sockets were full of stoppered-up lava. He’d consulted several chemists to find a cure, but after all he’d tried he knew he had little to no chance of finding one unless he told them what he was.

He’d been afraid to visit Yusuf; didn’t want to risk running into Eames. Didn’t want to risk making himself run into Eames.

But Eames had left Mombasa. He was based in Buenos Aires now, working freelance, as usual. Arthur had heard that he’d outdone himself on his last job; had picked up slack for a wounded architect, then forged the dreamer’s own self, voice and image, on a video recording, which had always been said to be impossible. Arthur should have at least offered his congratulations. Other gifted dream-forgers had emerged in the past few years, but there was still no one who could do quite what Eames could do.

Arthur had nursed the ludicrous half-hope that Eames would show up in one of his long dreams of Cardassia. The one time the human had stood before him, he was promptly eviscerated by two grim Order guards. They may have been his subconscious, but they were still Cardassian soldiers to the core; xenophobic, militant, none too keen on the object of their protection entertaining desires for Cardassianoids when he ought to be wanting the real thing, no -oid about it.

But he wished (and also didn't wish) that Eames would walk into his flat in Cardassia City, beautiful seamless face relaxed and happy, eyes glazed over with wonder at the view from the wide window. Would stand behind Nilor and take him in his arms, kiss his neck scales softly as Nilor pointed out the University, the Chamber of Justice, the Ministry of Media. Would understand everything.

Even if it was just a projection, he wanted to hear his voice saying that he understood, that he believed him, that he wasn’t afraid. That he thought Nilor Premak—armored, scaled, seamed, ridged, gray as stone, and not at all human—was beautiful.

*

“You need to work,” Dom told him. “I know you too well. Sitting around isn’t good for you.”

“Did Ariadne call you?”

“Oh, no, not at all. My instinct just tells me that something is wrong.”

He didn't consider Dom a particularly good liar.

*

He’d made sure to tell Ariadne and Dom where he was going. He had no idea if there were even any jobs where he was headed. But he knew how to find a definite job, if a job was really what he wanted. And what he wanted wasn’t exactly that.

Of all things he could have felt, he felt nervous. He hadn’t even felt particularly nervous when he was on the operating table receiving his new skin, or when he boarded the Flaxian flight that would take him to Alpha Centauri. Today was a merciful lull in his pain. He wasn’t bothered by the noonday light, nor by the sounds of cars and mopeds in the street. But he heard his heart quickening in its vaguely nonhuman rhythm, and was aware of a strange taste in his mouth. If he’d had his scales, they would’ve darkened.

He hit the buzzer. It sent an unpleasant vibration through his finger--he still occasionally had to bite back his surprise at the coarseness of 21st century technology.

“Yes?” said the disembodied voice.

 _...The man who defeats nine enemies out of ten,_ he remembered. That didn't only come from his mind. Garak actually had said something like that to him.

He had repressed it. But he was tired of fighting an enemy as impersonal as a ceiling fan, tired of wasting his energy getting clubbed and shredded while any possible victory would be an utterly empty one.

“Arthur Hollander,” he said finally.

 _There are...other options._

“It’s open. Come up.”


	7. Chapter 7

_He looks like any other human,_ Arthur told himself. _Same soft, flat skin. Same unshaded eyes; you can see everything they’re thinking. Boring. Nothing different about this one._

This particular human was standing in the door of his flat in Buenos Aires, smiling broadly. Warmly, almost.

“Arthur! What a surprise.” He moved aside slightly to indicate that Arthur could come in if he wanted, or not; either way, no skin off his…whatever the expression was.

His hair had grown; it was softer, wilder than he remembered it, showed more of the sun’s influence. He was wearing a blue, green and white striped Oxford that, as usual, didn’t fail to hint at the shape of the body beneath it, chest broad and convex as though he were always in the middle of taking a deep breath. It was still difficult for Arthur to not want to press his hand to Eames’s ribcage, to feel how subtly dynamic those thick, deep muscles were, to feel him tense and shift and breathe.

“Well, how have you been? Clearly I don’t need to tell you that it’s been awhile. You were in Boston?”

“Paris.”

Eames’s blithe gregariousness was more puzzling and sad than the coldness Arthur had expected from him.

“Ah. I knew it was one of those two.”

It was a transparent, childish parry, an old favorite of Eames’s, and one Arthur had used himself with Rochal. Pretending not to know something that was common knowledge, for the sake of convincing your opponent how little they mean to you.

Still, maybe Eames really hadn’t known.

“Eames, look. There’s a reason I came here.”

Eames stuck his hand in a pocket and fiddled with something clinking in there, keys or coins. He wore a haughty, amused expression that reminded Arthur why he’d often found the man so fucking irritating.

“Oh, I’m sure there is, Arthur. I’m sure there is.” He paused expectantly, seeming to await Arthur’s reply, but before  
Arthur could form a response he interjected. “You look exhausted. Maybe you’d prefer to back to your hotel and freshen up first, regroup a bit? I don’t think I’m busy tonight. And if so, there’s always--”

“Will you cut the bullshit?” Arthur fumed.

“Funny,” Eames chuckled, cocking his chin up a bit. “I thought that was my line.”

They stood silently for a moment, sizing each other up. It felt like an interrogation. He imagined his eyes were Corbin Entek’s, superficially mild but mirthless, with the power almost to disrupt ionic bonds. Arthur knew that by human standards he had little right to be angry, but twenty-three years of an emotional education were hard to efface in a single smog-laden afternoon. And if just the simple sort of moderate, simmering irritation was a signal of ordinary desire, the sort you seethed over a bit when you were alone, the sort that made you buy gland essences and jack yourself off late into the night, then this was….

Basically, this meant that he was fucked.

“Look.” Arthur tried to ratchet the Entek glare up to somewhere between kill and vaporize, hoping to leave his subject hanging in a shimmering interphase state of vaporous near-nothingness: a brief, translucent pirate’s banner, a warning to all other comers. “I came here to close a deal. I regret what I did only because I failed to claim what was mine. You’re probably with someone else right now. And I don’t care. I want you, and I don’t see any reason why I’m not going to fucking have you.”

There was a leaden silence.

Then Eames burst out laughing.

“Arthur, dear boy, what sort of Viking pickup manuals have you been reading? Really.” He had, without Arthur’s much noticing, shuffled closer to him, and was now close enough that Arthur could hear his lips opening and closing. “You know there’s a reason why none of those early Norse Greenland settlements survived, and I don’t think it was the weather.”

Arthur couldn’t help but laugh as well.

“Well, in answer to your frankly weird as fuck question—I don’t even think that was a question; I don’t think I even know what that was—I do like you. Still, in spite of lots of things. But honestly, I can’t be arsed to waste time pining over someone who rejects me and won’t say why and then goes on a Somnacin bender that leads everyone to think he’s dead –oh yes, I know all about that. If you fuck off again, I assure you, I will not waste even the three minutes of an Erasure song thinking about you.”

Arthur tried to suppress a smile.

“So you’re…we can…”

Eames shrugged.

“Sure. Why not.”

Arthur closed the distance between them gingerly, unsure what to do with his hands, his head, his knees once he was sharing Eames’s space. He rested his chin on Eames’s firm shoulder, pressed his temple to the side of Eames’s face. Breathed in his alien scent, the smell like friction, like sacrificial wood smoke, like the hot vegetal winds of the Sakuri desert, but also like none of these things.

“Henry. I-“

“Shhh.” He could feel Eames’s cheek moving as he spoke, rough and supple. They breathed together for a few moments. Eames’s hands came to rest on his upper back, cupping his shoulder blades delicately, bracketing him in.

He couldn’t help himself. He ran his fingers along the inside of Eames’s waistband, untucked his shirt, and slid his palms up the bare, clammy curve of his spine. Eames’s breath hitched softly from the sudden contact of skin on skin. Arthur pressed Eames closer against his chest, stroking invisible geometries onto his back with his cold, precise fingertips. He wanted to hear more of those shaking breaths, wanted to know exactly what he was making Eames feel.

Arthur kissed his neck. Kissed all over his neck, from the throat to the dip at the shoulder to the meeting of earlobe  
and jaw. It was, as expected, not as exquisitely sensitive as Arthur’s. And it lacked the cabled ridges, complex, architectonic, different on every Cardassian. But there was something lovely in its vulnerability. With his mouth he could feel the muscle underneath, could feel the thrumming pulse. He felt oddly privileged, trusted, to be allowed to bare his teeth so close to such a life-or-death artery. He felt a sudden surge of protectiveness towards that naked pulse, wanted to cover it, to hide it from all Eames’s enemies.

Again, _fuck_.

*

He lay on his side on Eames’s bed, tracing Eames’s collarbone and Adam’s apple, leaning over and kissing paths across his lightly furred chest.

“Can I just—touch you like this, for a while?” Arthur asked, looking into Eames’s eyes, lighter but still opaque from absorbing the acute midafternoon sun.

If facial expressions could ever be said to have exact opposites, Eames’s face was the precise opposite of the way it had looked when Arthur had arrived at his doorstep. His gaze was entranced, almost wistful; with a subtle base note of something like fear but not quite.

“I don’t even know what to make of you,” Eames said hoarsely. “You’re just so strange.” He lifted his hand to stroke Arthur’s cheek. “And wonderful, and ridiculous, and strange again. And beautiful. Very, very beautiful. That most of all, I think.” He raised his head and closed his eyes, and they kissed, first softly, then hungrily; he pressed one palm to Arthur’s back, using his other hand to stroke his hip and up to the slight hollow of his waist. “God. Who the hell are you? I can’t figure you out. I never could completely figure you out. But I think I’d rather do this instead.”

Arthur smiled against his lips, then drew Eames’s full bottom lip into his mouth completely, suckling it, licking it with the tip of his tongue. Eames groaned into Arthur’s mouth.

He ran his tongue along Eames’s teeth, between his teeth and his upper lip, over the ridge of his palate. Arthur’s  
fingers unhurriedly caressed the delicate, glabrous skin of Eames’s inner arms, stroked his palms, crept ticklishly behind his thighs and made him startle slightly. He broke away from Eames’s lips to press kisses to unanticipated places. Wrist, hipbone, calf.

“I’ve had people try to put their mouths on every inch of my body before ,” Eames mused, pulling away briefly and reluctantly from Arthur’s lips. “But it was mostly for the challenge, I think. You seem like you actually want to.”

“I do,” Arthur said, lifting Eames’s leg, trailing his fingertips along the back of his calf and opening his hot, wet mouth over the shinbone. “I want to feel every part of you.” He was so close now to spreading his legs completely. Arthur moved his hand to the back of Eames’s knee, to the delicate skin there that, touched and stroked, made the other man writhe and whimper.

“Arthur,” he said breathlessly. “Arthur. My beautiful boy. Fuck me. Oh god, please, put your perfect cock in me. I’ve needed you for so fucking long. I don’t even care anymore if you know it.”

Arthur froze.

*

Arthur had tried to fuck a human exactly once.

It had been a long time ago, when Mal was still alive. It was the winter holidays, and he was staying with the Cobbs, watching the children while they attended parties and worked on some sort of highly lucrative dreamshare tourist attraction for wealthy skiiers.

The man had chatted him up at a bar. His name was John, and he was a lawyer, and he was reasonably attractive, with blue eyes and sandy hair and a square jaw. They had kissed in the bathroom, and then Arthur went home with him.

Once they were in his apartment, John met Arthur’s eyes hungrily, and began to remove his tie. And Arthur had  
enthusiastically grabbed his arm, trying to get him to put his hands on Arthur’s ass. But he’d forgotten his own strength.

There was a loud snap.

“Motherfucker!” the man cried, grabbing his arm and seething with pain. “Get the fuck out of my apartment, now. Wait-call me an ambulance first. Then get the fuck out of my apartment.”

Mal asked him some time later how his love life was. And he had, in a rare moment of candidness, he confided (leaving out some details, of course) that he didn’t know how not to be too rough. He was thinking of Eames, of how strong he looked, and yet how easily Arthur would be able to lift him, to carry him, to break him.

 _I suppose it’s better to always err on the side of gentleness,_ she reflected.

 

*  
So he was afraid his thrusts would bruise; afraid he’d dislocate Eames’s arm, or wrench his back, or worse, if he got carried away. He didn’t want to hurt him; he really didn’t. Nor did he want to show him that, despite all appearances, he was roughly three times stronger. That would take a lot of explaining that he wasn’t sure he’d ever be ready for.

“Arthur?” Eames asked, concerned. “If you’d rather I top, that’s fine. Or I can ride you. Really, I just want you.”

“Why don’t you fuck me, then,” he replied, lying back languidly in a grid of sunlight on the dark blue bedspread.

“I can do that,” Eames grinned, moving over Arthur and wrapping his hands around the backs of Arthur’s thighs. Arthur felt warmed all over by even that localized touch; he stretched back, inviting Eames to caress his skin, all of it; to further warm and relax him.

And Eames took the invitation eagerly, mouthing Arthur’s neck and breastbone, then moving to his neatly limned nipples. He sucked Arthur’s nipples rapturously, frequently gazing upward to check on the progress of his unraveling. Arthur hadn’t known exactly how much he’d respond to having his nipples kissed and teased and lapped at—they weren’t an erogenous zone in Cardassians—but he knew he’d dreamt of doing the same to Eames. And he wondered if that kind of attention felt as sweet and hot to Eames as it did to him.

He hoped so.

*

“Can I put my mouth on you?” Eames asked, almost shyly.

“I thought you already had,” Arthur said. “Lots of places.”

“I want to put my mouth on your hole,” he replied, his head pillowed on Arthur’s thigh, brazenly breathing in the scent of his cock and pubic hair.

“Oh.” That was not done where he came from. It was seen as a sentimentality: the worst kind of perversion. “Does it  
feel good?”

“You’ve never had it?” he asked, now leaning on his elbow, looking up at Arthur—adoringly, is this? Fuck, fuck. “Oh,  
it’s wonderful. It’s like, well, the best of everything mouth and the best of everything arse, combined. You’ll see. You can’t use a hammer for everything, you know? Sometimes you need a chisel.”

“Well, you’ve just proven that you probably shouldn’t use your mouth for talking, so I might as well let you make it useful for something else.” He ran an affectionate hand through Eames’s hair, massaging his scalp. He already felt painfully hard. It was probably for the best that Eames fucked him now. He wouldn’t be able to last a second inside Eames’s ass.

“It’s going to feel wet,” Eames explained wryly. “Ready?”

“Oh, fuck,” Arthur moaned. “Yes.”

Eames pushed Arthur’s legs gently up to his chest, then licked his lips thoroughly and filthily before spreading Arthur open and pressing those lips to his hole.

That was all he did the first few times—kiss his hole, and brush his moist lips across it.

Then Arthur felt the very tip of Eames’s tongue against him, playfully, almost innocently, like the edge of a pinky  
testing bathwater. The tongue and lips alternated, licking him, moistening him, encouraging him open. Eames licked him from the base of his spine to his scrotum before returning to the sucking kisses he most preferred, if only because he so liked the idea of being kissed so lovingly there.

He also found it revolting. He wished he were on his stomach so that he could hide his face; could grimace at the doting fool he found himself powerless to stop becoming.

And would Eames still do this if he knew his _beautiful boy_ actually looked nothing like he looked? Humans generally weren’t too amenable to bumps and scales. They generally feared and loathed reptiles. Healthy, sexually attractive skin was brown or pink or somewhere in between. Not gray. On Cardassia Nilor had never much doubted his beauty, and he still didn’t—he knew the real Nilor was an ideal Cardassian male of a certain type, a finely-etched ephebe heartwrecker for whom both men and women got speechless and wrote poetry and wanked furiously (not that it saved him from pain, often or even once). But the problem was that no one had ever sent Eames that memo.

That wasn’t even the worst of what could happen if Eames found out, or if he blabbed to him. Eames was a criminal, after all, someone who got his money and his jollies from invading peoples’ minds and faking documents. An opportunist _par excellence_. He could sell him out, to the government or a crime syndicate. Quarry of a lifetime. Arthur could become a freak show, a sex slave, a medical experiment, or at best an answerer of endless stupid questions. Eames could be the guy who unwittingly fucked a scabby space alien, the guy who’s always got a great story when the opportunity arises.

*

They fucked slowly, as evening fell and the air began to cool beyond a comfortable temperature for him. He began to shiver, the sweat on his skin from both of them chilling him still further, and Eames held him close, paused to rub his arms, drew the blankets over them despite his own heat-ruddiness from their exertions.

Arthur’s thoughts of his own impostorhood had softened his dick. He felt as if he was tricking Eames into giving him pleasure, which made him limp no matter how assiduously Eames stroked him.

“It’s no use,” he finally whispered into Eames’s sticky neck.

“I’ll make you come,” he promised. “Just my mouth on your cock. However long you need.”

Arthur shut his eyes tightly against the solicitous want on Eames’s face. He counted the seconds, minutes until the other man came.

Afterward, he kissed Eames’s lips quickly—motions to be gone through—and turned on his side, away from Eames, clenching himself into the pillow. Eames seemed uncharacteristically oblivious, running his heated hand down Arthur’s back and murmuring. “My beautiful boy,” he said. “My sweet sad robot.”

 _Fuck you._

*

He woke the next morning and at least three things were rather badly wrong.

First, he was fucking freezing. His limbs were rigid at his side, and he was still facing in the other direction, but he’d scooted over to be near Eames’s warmth.

Second, his pillow was…no. He didn’t even want to think about it. Besides, it had been a damp night. It could easily have been ambient moisture. Easily.

Third, his head felt as though both Eames’s metaphorical chisel and hammer had turned devastatingly literal and were competing to see which could hack or smash their way through his sinuses first.

And he knew he couldn’t live like this. He wasn’t exactly sure how he could live, but it wasn’t like this.

He couldn’t keep running away from Eames either. He knew Garak was right—he had a weakness, and trying to fight it had only depleted him, turned him into someone who needed saving from his own mind. But he couldn’t give into this weakness without giving in completely. He couldn’t lie next to Eames and pretend to be a human who liked cheese and had grown up in Michigan and had never seen Voihar Nebula from a shuttlepod: like an enormous night-lit city sheltered by a massive tent, made of billowing silks and suspended perfume clouds, stormed by riders of enormous golden beasts with riverine fleece.

Some of his fellow agents had had weaknesses for power. Some were weak for wanting to leave their legacy behind in the Order, or Cardassia. Some loved their children too much, some their friends. Some turned a blind eye to the faults of artists.

His weakness was wanting someone to love him in the old, sentimental, pre-Union ways. Someone he chose. It felt somewhat more acceptable to say this to himself at four AM.

He looked over Eames sleeping. Wanted to feel he had the right to touch him, to slide his arms under the blanket and drape his hands across his hot, bare skin, soothing despite there being no real need of soothing.

He reached out, emboldened, and stroked Eames’s sweaty hair back from his forehead. The human’s eyelids began to tremble open.

Eames smiled at him.

“You look like you have something to say. It's four AM. It had better be good.”

“Henry,” Arthur began, quaveringly, his hand still in Eames’s hair, “I have a small favor to ask of you.”


	8. Chapter 8

“Arthur, what the bloody _hell_ do you need 100 milligrams of pancuronium bromide for? Planning to open up your own executioners’ practice?”

“You’ll understand when I show you Also, I need a rat.”

“You need a _rat_?” Eames sat up in bed, flicking the lamp on. Now Arthur could clearly see his incredulity. “Well. I’m sorry our sex life is already too vanilla for you, if you want to bring rodents and muscle relaxants into it.”

“This is serious. I have to show you something.”

“Dear fellow, I think we can be certain that rats are not immune to large doses of lethal drugs. Can we move onto more unproven questions , like-- ”

“Eames, will you stop trying to dazzle me with your rapier-sharp wit and shut up and listen.”

He closed his mouth and nodded, looking a bit sheepish.

“I have to tell you something. I really didn’t want to tell you this, now or ever, but if we’re going to mean anything at all to each other, I have to get this out of the way. Or else whatever we have will be meaningless. All your feelings will be for someone who doesn’t actually exist.“ He swallowed hard, and grasped Eames’s hand. For what felt like a long time he was unable to continue. Eames stared at him blankly.

 

“I’m an alien.”

Eames was silent for a few beats. Then his face creased into a smile, and he laughed.

“My. For a second I was really afraid that you were going to tell me something horrible, like that you were a murderer or a bigamist or the president of the S Club 7 fanclub.”

”I am serious. And I know that if you believe me, I run the risk that you’ll sell me out. I wouldn’t blame you. I’d probably have done the very same thing if I’d had a lover who was actually an alien back on Cardassia.”

“Car- _what_? No offense, Arthur, but that sounds like something out of a drive-thru sci fi movie with spray-painted foam planets and aluminum foil headpieces.”

“Henry--Eames--please.” He knew how pained he must look, leaning his throbbing head back against the headboard, squeezing Eames’s hand still. “I’d almost rather you turn me into the FBI or the Russian Mob or some backwater zoo even than that you don’t believe me.” He paused, gathering courage. “If you don’t believe me, it’s sort of as if I don’t exist.”

Eames ran a hand through Arthur’s hair, cupped the back of his head, attempted to draw him close. Arthur pulled away.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I think I know what’s going on here,” Eames stated gently. “It has to do with all that time you spent dreaming, doesn’t it?”

“No—“

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he whispered. “But you have to understand that whatever you experienced wasn’t real. This, right here, is real. Don’t worry, I won’t turn you over to the white coats. But you absolutely have to promise me that you won’t try anything rash. Nothing, for example, including pancuronium bromide.”

“Fuck you, Eames. I’m well aware that I’m not dreaming right now.”

“Yes, but dreams can make us believe—“

Arthur tried to assemble his most devastatingly haughty expression, imagined he was talking to some know-it-all subordinate who tried to correct him on some matter of security camera placement, or behavioral psychology, or poison dosage.

“I know quite well what dreams can make us do, Mr. Eames. Please, if you’re going to insult my intelligence and experience, at least be aware that you’re doing so and don’t spit platitudes at me as if they’re great revelations.”

“Arthur, I’m just very concerned.” He held Arthur’s face with both his hands, looking closely at him. “I just got you. I really don’t want to lose you like this.”

“If you’re not going to at least consider believing me,” he replied placidly, “then I’d really rather you not have  
me.”

He calmly rose, still naked, freezing and in pain, and strode over to the door, which he tore from its hinges with a brief cracking sound and minimal effort.

“What the—Arthur, that’s my fucking door,” Eames gaped.

“That _was_ your fucking door, Eames,” Arthur answered, matter-of-factly, leaning the door politely against Eames’s dresser. He was not unpleased at having rattled Eames’s patronizing certainty.

He looked around, spotted an iron crowbar by Eames’s bed. He seized it. Effortlessly bent it almost in half.

“Get me the pancuronium bromide or that will….” He couldn’t say what he had planned to say.

Eames stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. He was visibly trying to regain his composure, shaking his hair out of his eyes and affecting his usual smirk.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not sit and watch the man I’m a bit too fond of inject himself with one hundred fifty times a lethal dose of muscle relaxant. Can we just say that I’ll try my best to believe you?”

“It isn’t lethal to Cardassians. Why do you think I wanted it to show you?” he replied, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring through the grayly glowing window at the quiescent buildings across the street. "I can tolerate things humans can't. I can do things humans can't."

They didn’t speak for over a minute. Eames broke the silence.

“First of all, me selling you out…that...isn’t really an option,” he began. “That particular sort of double-crossing isn’t much fun for me. Too much like shooting fish in a barrel, really. I like a challenge. I don’t generally prey on easy targets. Unless it’s part of a job. And even then.”

“But what if it was part of a job someday? What if the wrong person found out, demanded my blood or my skin or my ass on a silver platter?”

“There’s a reason I work for myself, Arthur,” he chuckled. “No job is non-negotiable. Especially not these days. If it isn’t interesting, I’ve got ways of avoiding it. Dragging a solitary, naked alien out of bed and selling him to some yakuza overlord sounds dreadfully boring to me. You can be done with that by noon. And besides, you’re much more useful to me if you’re free. You’re sharp as fuck, and I’ve always known you were strong, but god, now that I’ve seen what you can do, what criminal wouldn’t want you on his side? And, in case you didn’t hear me any of the hundred times I told you yesterday, you’re absolutely gorgeous. That doesn't change just because you're from...Carpathia?”

"Cardassia. Carpathia's a mountain range in Europe."

"Oh, whatever. Pedantic thing. Trying to tell me you know my own planet better than I do?" Eames said cheekily.

Arthur closed his eyes tightly.

“I don’t really look like this.”

“You could have fooled me.”

He turned towards Eames. “I’ve been surgically altered to appear human. This isn’t my skin. The body is mine, the basic shape of all the features are mine. We’re…what you’d call humanoid. We’ve got the same general proportions, eyes, noses, mouths. We can even breed with humans, if you can believe that…long story. But if you could see how I actually look…I am unmistakably not from around here, Eames.”

Eames breathed audibly.

“I’d like to see you.”

He turned towards him reluctantly, fixing him with sad eyes.

“Maybe you will. I can’t guarantee you’ll like it. Who knows. I can’t guarantee anything one way or the other.”

“Those eyes, are they yours?”

“Yes. Nilor—that’s my name, if you can believe it—actually refers to a sort of wildcat with big, luminous dark eyes. Fairly common name for boys with brown or black eyes. So yes. They’re quite natural.”

“Mmm.” Eames smiled happily. “That’s an excellent start.”

He couldn’t help but smile back at him, however weakly.

“Arthur—err, Nilor—what should I even—“

“Arthur’s fine. Keeps things less complicated.”

“You don’t look well.” Eames patted the bed beside him. “Come here.”

“I’m allright.”

“No you’re not. All morning you’ve looked like you were in terrible pain. What is it?”

He sighed. “Allergic to the Earth’s atmosphere, pretty much. Gives me pretty bad headaches. I had a drug administered  
to me before I left for Earth so that I could tolerate it all. It wore off.”

“Get the fuck over here,” Eames practically snarled. “Lie down. Head on my lap. Come on.”

Arthur did as he was told, laying his head across Eames’s thighs.

Eames ran a hand gently through Arthur’s hair, his other hand stroking his forehead.

“Where does it hurt?” he murmured, leaning down.

Arthur indicated his temples and sinuses.

“Would this help?” Eames asked, beginning to lightly massage Arthur’s temples. Arthur nodded.

“A bit. It feels good, anyway.”

Eames continued his ministrations, stroking the blazingly tender spots on Arthur’s face, rubbing softly and tenderly the dark hollows beneath his eyes, and the places above his ears and behind his ears and between his eyes. The skin of his hands was cool and silky. The pain was still there, but the touches felt wonderful.

“I’m not just an alien. I’m also from 300 years in the future. Isn’t that fucked up? Temporal paradoxes and such.”

“Shhhh,” Eames whispered.

“Don’t you have a thousand other questions?” Arthur croaked, reveling in the gentle pressure of Eames’s fingers. “Aren’t you at least a little suspicious that I could be up to no good? Our people are enemies, Eames. Aren’t there things you want to know? How I got here? What I was doing here?”

“Not right now,” he said softly. “Not right now.”


	9. Chapter 9

CARDASSIA

The doorbell’s ring came too soon. He wasn’t ready.

 _Fucking impatient ass_ , he huffed, smoothing the black silk of the nightrobe across his thighs and straightening its lapels. He looked in the oval mirror. The forgery hadn’t taken yet again. He still looked like a human. He’d flashed his Order credentials at all the projections they saw; the ones with security clearances got the message that he was altered for an upcoming mission as a Lissepian rent boy on Devara III.

He’d already lived that mission, and chose the nightrobe because of it. It clung tautly to his deceptively boyish muscles, revealed the inviting tidepools of his collar and breastbones. It was, ironically, of a Terran-inspired design; Terran-style tailoring had come into vogue in the rebellious youth underground during the time of the border skirmishes and the Battle of Setlik III, and it still appealed to a certain kind of nostalgic aesthete, who liked imagining that he was debauching, or maybe punishing, a flinty-eyed young Federation sympathizer. The Cardassian bioreplicant pirate who purchased him had had rough hands and sour breath, and somehow Arthur had still felt gorgeous as the client ran his fingers beneath the robes’ collar and trailed it over the young man’s smooth shoulders and the curve of his lower back.

Not that it was really any use looking or feeling especially gorgeous if he couldn’t forge his old skin back on. He just looked like Arthur Hollander, human, in a black silk robe. Eames could always use his imagination based on the Cardassians he’d seen around him, but it wouldn’t be the same.

And now he was here.

“One moment,” he sighed, looking at his disappointingly human face in the mirror one last time and sipping from the bowl of red leaf tea on the mirror stand.

They’d worked on getting Eames into the dream unnoticed. Projection-Eames had already been met with less than perfect hospitality, so it followed that the real thing would probably not be allowed to walk right into Arthur’s compound. Arthur had given him the layout of the city, but they hadn’t been able to figure out how exactly to get him past the people of Arthur’s almost-Cardassia City.

Then Arthur remembered the non-people of Cardassia City.

“You can forge animals, can’t you?” he’d asked.

“A bit. It’s harder,” Eames answered, pacing back and forth in the bedroom they’d shared for the past three weeks. “Since you’re essentially wearing a projection, and your mind comes up with something of a mind for each projection, or at least a set of habits and desires that control their behavior in the dream, when you forge an animal the animal takes over a little more. So you still have your mind, but then there’s also this lovely lady rat you notice, and her tail’s looking especially shiny tonight, and you’re ever so slightly compelled to just blow off your plans and go show her the best dumpster in town so she’ll…I don’t even know what rats do in bed, but you want to do it.”

“OK. But you can do it?”

“I think so,” he said, sliding onto the bed beside Arthur. “I just can’t completely guarantee that I’ll make it to the compound.”

“I trust you,” Arthur replied, pressing his cheek into Eames’s shoulder. And Eames had run his fingers through his hair, and kissed the top of his head.

“I trust myself too,” he smiled.

*

 

Arthur opened the door, readying himself for the barrage of questions and observations and—he hoped—kisses that would come.

“Arthur,” said a deep, familiar drawl, “I’m sorry if I wasn’t who you were expecting.”

It was a Cardassian of average height and middle age, long-faced, with unblinking whitish blue eyes and a head perpetually cocked to the side. He rested his hand on the doorframe and looked at Arthur expectantly, as if he were honestly expecting Arthur to kiss him or at least to invite him in with great enthusiasm.

“Rochal.”

Allright. He could handle this. He could just shoot him in the face and be done with it.

He thought of a disruptor. He whispered to himself, _I have a disruptor. Mid 24th century, Romulan style. Nastiest there is._

None appeared.

“I’m afraid it won’t do any good to try and shoot me,” he said apologetically. “The boss has outlawed weapons in this dream. Or any objects that might be used as weapons. At least for you, Arthur. And anyone who comes in contact with you, so you can’t commandeer it and get yourself out.”

“The _boss_ —has _outlawed_ —You can’t be serious,” Arthur retorted, trying to process that avalanche of bizarre ideas.

“That’s right.”

“And who the fuck is this boss, Rochal?” he asked. “I’m the dreamer. I make the rules. You’re not even supposed to know that this is a dream.”

“Everything will make sense,” he murmured, affecting gentleness. “Everything will make sense.”

Arthur delivered a vicious right cross to Rochal’s face. He staggered backwards out the door, but no sooner did he fall than ten Order guards entered the room.

One of them applied a dermal regenerator to Rochal and helped him to his feet again. Two other huge, sullen-faced men seized Arthur’s arms and pinned him in place.

“Your little vole trick was clever,” Rochal said merrily, “but we caught him. He was moving a bit too purposefully to be a vole. And we were expecting him anyway, so we’d been waiting for any unusual visitors up to the compound. We knew it was only a matter of time before he’d come to visit you. You’re lucky, though, you know,” he added casually. “I’m not sure your pretty robe and pretty pout would’ve done it for him this time. Not now that he knows what you are. How could you really expect a human to want you? And why would you want him? You could have any Cardassian begging for your fingernail clippings in a jar, and you’re desparate to impress someone from a species that looks like a bunch of zabo rumps? Have some self-respect, Arthur,” he clucked.

“You caught him? Where the fuck is he?” Arthur did his best not to betray his desperation, but it was probably betrayed anyway.

“The boss has him.”

“When I get my hands on this motherfucking boss,” Arthur growled, and the guards chuckled.

“I wouldn’t bet on those hands,” said Rochal. “I can’t see them becoming much freer anytime soon.”

Arthur squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t will himself to drop dead and wake up. But the fact that there was waking up at all meant that it was only a dream. It would last an hour longer, tops. He might be tortured, and it would almost certainly hurt. Eames might be tortured—and, intimately familiar as he was with Cardassian methods, he relished the idea of that even less. He imagined the device they fondly called the “molecule massager”, which delivered the sort of pain one might feel if all of ones’ cells were vibrating individually at dizzying speeds.

He used to beg Garak to give him a turn at applying that one. It was fun to watch.

Would you really want to be with a man who couldn’t withstand interrogation? Someone who needs to be saved and comforted like a child? _He’s right, Arthur. You need more self-respect,_ another voice whispered in his mind. For a mind-voice, though, it was a strangely lifelike one, complete with the hints of breath and muscular vibration that accompany a body’s speech. He ignored it.

“I don’t know why you’re going to all this trouble,” Arthur said, as nonchalantly as possible. “We’re going to wake up. This will all be over. You’re wasting your time.”

“Are we?” Rochal inquired. “There are a few new developments, Arthur, that we feel you should be aware of. Sit him down,” he motioned to the guards, who wrenched Arthur’s arms behind his back and dragged him to the chair in the corner. He struggled uselessly as they tied him to the chair with black rope.

“Now, Arthur,” Rochal began, as if he were lecturing him on the best means of detecting a lie or planting a bomb in a shuttlepod, “it really shouldn’t surprise you to learn that we haven’t been idle.”

“We?”

“Your…friends here on Cardassia. How could we be idle? We’re Cardassians. We’re agents of the Obsidian Order. If we have a problem, we work to solve it. We don’t believe in limitations. And we’ve come up with a rather elegant solution to an old problem of ours.”

“I can’t wait“, he groaned. He felt as if he were humoring them.

“So you know, right, Arthur, that one doesn’t die in real life if one dies in a dream, right?”

“Right,” he nodded. The ropes were tied so tightly that he found it more exerting and painful to struggle, so he tried to relax his muscles as much as possible. The pressure of the ropes was still almost unbearable; it constricted his breathing and made him feel as though his blood were stuck in his limbs. Also, he could have sworn that one of the guards farted.

“Well, we found that a rather unfortunate limitation to our goals. And as I said before, we don’t believe in limitations.”

“Do go on, Rochal. Your sloganizing has been the thing I’ve missed most in my time on Earth.”

“So, with the boss’s guidance, we developed a little device that taps into the sleeper’s mind and, well, to put it bluntly, shorts it out. Sends so many conflicting signals, millions of them, to the brain at once that the brain can’t process them and shuts down, just like that.”

“That’s not possible.”

Rochal grinned. “You feel pain in dreams, don’t you? You can orgasm. You process visual and auditory stimulation.”

“Of course."

“Well, we’ve just used our superior technology to do your fun little PASIV machine one better. Think of it, perhaps, as receiving a million dreams at once.” Rochal seemed pleased with his analogy. “You of all people should have known that there were risks associated with exposing one’s brain to so many…influences.”

“I had wondered about it,” he admitted. “Wondered if such a thing was possible. But I never—“

“Well, what do you think your wondering becomes in your subconscious? Your wondering is our theorizing, our planning, our building. You have so much knowledge, so much cunning. You’re barely using any of it. Someone had to. “

Arthur wanted to vomit.

“How do you even know that you’re part of my subconscious? Shouldn’t you think you’re real?”

“Oh, we’ve always known. It’s hard to fool a Cardassian mind,” Rochal gloated. “But as soon as we learned what we were capable of, it didn’t matter anymore. If you can kill, you’re real. That, my dear, is what makes a man.”


	10. Chapter 10

He was getting quite familiar with his two personal guards by now. They had viselike grips on his arms as their somber little party walked through the almost-barren city streets, and he was learning how to synchronise his steps with theirs even though they were each at least a kilohand taller than he. He’d been getting tired of tripping because of their longer and more impatient strides.

“The boss will explain everything,” Rochal beamed, walking next to him and the guards as if the guards weren’t there and they were just having a leisurely stroll through the city.

They moved down the central thoroughfare, market stalls full of eclectic wares sitting abandoned in the streets, personal transporter vehicles lying on their sides, service bots scuttling about like electric tumbleweeds. Ghost city. The buildings got shorter and sparser, and he could smell the desert, could feel its hot staccato winds fingering his barely covered skin like goods for sale. It was usually a sublimely beautiful walk, downward-sloping, crosshatched by invisible energies—wind and insect and diselenium trail. There wasn’t much beauty in this.

In the distance, mauve, lightly domed divanium-rooved buildings became visible like the caps of Sorendian toadstools. Built to blend in with the desert.

 _This wasn’t in my dream,_ he thought with alarm. _I was very careful, I knew how many buildings I had, where all the roads were._ It was as if there were another dreamer, someone besides him and Eames hooked up to the PASIV.

That was impossible.

“The boss’s headquarters,” Rochal indicated. “Beautiful taste in architecture, don’t you think, Arthur?”

“Why do you keep calling me Arthur?” he asked, suddenly suspicious. “You’ve always called me Nilor before.”

“Turns out you seem more like an Arthur after all,” Rochal said calmly.

There appeared to be no entrances to the building.

“How do we get in?” Arthur asked.

A long carpetlike strip rolled out as they approached.

“Step on,” Rochal said. They all did so, and a violet ray came out and scanned them. They were then abruptly dissolved by a transporter signal.

When they rematerialized, Arthur found himself and—and his new appendages—in a dark room rather like the inside of one of those warehouses in Torr sector. The walls were a bit cleaner, the ceiling reinforced by thick buttresses. Everything looked to be in Tarana Modern style, a favorite of Arthur’s as an adolescent.

A door slid open behind him. He was unable to turn around of his own will. He attempted to crane his neck backwards, but the figures who entered the room were swathed in shadow

“Is he ready to meet me?” a man’s voice said, clear, young, strong-sounding. He was surprised; he’d been expecting the boss to be, if not Tain, then someone like him. One of the Order higher-ups. Or his father, or mother (well, it was a _him_ ), or Legate Dergan.

“I’m sure he’ll regret not having done so sooner, dearest,” Rochal said quietly. “Guards, it’s about time we introduce young Arthur to our boss, don’t you think?”

They jerked him around roughly, and he looked at the silhouetted figure. Slim, erect, with symmetrical shoulders, long legs, a proud chest. _It’s not bloody Farlak, is it?_ he moaned to himself. _If my subconscious has such a shit sense of humor…_

“Arthur,” said the voice assertively. “It’s a genuine pleasure.”

The man stepped forward into the aureole of light.

Narrow, somewhat close-set dark brown eyes; rather long, deeply indented lips; delicate neck- and eyebrow-ridges, like fine, intricately tatted macramé; any and all noteworthy features still firmly within the realm of symmetry and good taste. Expression somehow dreamy and stern at the same time.

Nilor Premak.

*

“This is ridiculous,” Arthur spat. “I’m Nilor Premak. You’re not me.”

“That’s exactly who I am,” he said sweetly, stretching his long neck out and inhaling deeply, as if to show off to Arthur what he could do with his body.

 _Okay, fuck. I’m beautiful._

 _But that is not the point._

“This isn’t possible!” cried Arthur. “ _You_ did all this? You invented this supposed killing machine? You controlled my dream? You were talking in my head? ”

“Regardless of whether or not I did any of it,” Nilor stated, “ _you_ did all of it. And when your darling human dies--which he will--you only have yourself to blame. Come. I want to show you something.” Rochal followed him, and the look of obsequious lust on his face was sickening.

He led them down a narrow, rust-colored corridor to another room, one wall of which had an enormous window.

“Show him,” Nilor motioned.

The guards nearly shoved him into the window. As soon as his eyes could focus, he saw a room full of metallic contraptions, with a reclined doctors’ chair in the middle. A man was slumped in the chair, his face sweaty, eyes almost fully closed.

“Eames!” Arthur shouted, attempting to throw his shoulders into the glass. The guards immediately restrained him.

“When we learned about his talent, we built one of those Romulan devices that prevent matter from changing form,” Nilor explained. “Useful for interrogating thixotropic species. So he won’t be turning into a vole again.”

“Fuck you all,” Arthur said, coldly, sadly.

“We wanted you to watch, and to see exactly how powerful we were,” said Nilor, his smile as crisp and sweet as a peapod made of folded paper. “Hopefully then you will take us more seriously. Know that we aren’t merely…projections. We’re Cardassians. We’re your people. And we’re also you. You can do these things too. Imagine the weapons you could build. You could remake Earth in your own image, in Cardassia’s image. With our help.”

Rochal moved near Nilor and rubbed the small of his back lightly, breathing in his hair, and whispered something in his ear that made Nilor smile in an almost embarrassed way.

Arthur hated the jealousy and arousal that sight stirred up in him. He was—horribly enough—envious of Nilor.

Envious of him for winning Rochal’s utter devotion. Envious of him for being devious enough to build a device powerful enough to kill a person in their dreams. Envious of him for being confident and beautiful and elegant and thoroughly Cardassian. He had power Arthur had never had, or at least exerted, in real life. This Nilor wouldn’t have rolled over and begged for tummy scratches from humans. He would have used them for what he needed and discarded them, would have built himself an empire. He would have stolen Cobb’s PASIV; become wealthy through organized crime; sold dreamsharing technology to some small repressive country for surveillance, in exchange for power, and become the grey eminence behind a highly satisfying reign of terror. This was a Nilor without that famous weakness.

 _See, Garak?_ he thought. _It is possible._

“Come on, Arthur,” Nilor whispered in his ear. “Just let us show you.”

“Not with him,” Arthur replied solemnly.

“That’s not an option.”

 _How am I two different people?_ Arthur asked himself, staring in horror at Eames, who looked to be desperately ill, and weak, and in great pain. _How am I here, and also there? How is that me conscious enough to be dreaming?_

Nilor had left the room. When Arthur saw him again he was on the other side of the glass, leaning over Eames, speaking to him slowly, caressing his face and shoulder. Eames was looking at Nilor with unadulterated loathing in what little of his eyes he could open. It made Arthur‘s chest ache.

Eames appeared to be looking right in his direction, but he didn’t register any recognition. All Arthur had to communicate were his eyes, and he stared at Eames, trying desperately to get his attention, but Eames kept looking right through him.

 _It isn't as if he can't see at all,_ Arthur puzzled. _He’s clearly looking right at Nilor. Maybe he can’t focus long distance._

 _Or maybe—maybe the window is a mirror on the other side._

 _A mirror._

An idea occurred to Arthur then. It seemed foolish, but it was his only chance.

*

“Nilor,” Arthur asked shyly, “I have a rather silly thing to ask.”

“Ask,” Nilor shrugged, massaging his own hands. “If it has anything to do with Mr. Eames, though, the answer is no. I’ve given the guards the order to begin setting up the device. He’ll be dead in minutes.”

“It has nothing to do with him,” Arthur said, trying to sound slightly contemptuous, trying to sound as though he were enraptured with Nilor. Which was not entirely untrue.

“What is it?”

“May I touch you?” he asked. “You’re lovely.”

“Fantasizing about fucking yourself?” Nilor laughed dryly, and Arthur tried to look disappointed. “I’m not into humans, unfortunately. But I suppose you may touch me.” A wicked glint came into his eyes. “Guard, raise his hand for him. Let him touch my face.”

The guard wrenched Arthur’s hand upwards and raised it to Nilor’s cheek. It was pleasant to touch. Arthur might have considered kissing him, on the cheek or the lips, if they were alone and Nilor weren’t such a malignant prick.

“Look at us, Nilor,” he smiled, guiding Nilor’s cheek to look toward the window.

As they turned, he used all of his concentration to dream the window opaque, so that they were looking into a mirror. They stood side by side, human and Cardassian, almost identical half-smiles on their shapely lips. And Arthur then began to smile even more brightly than Nilor, his lips tingling, his body nearly broken apart by the vertiginous strangeness of the moment.

“What are you doing?” Nilor asked uncertainly.

Arthur turned in the guards’ grasp towards Nilor’s reflection, gazed into its eyes.

“There I am.” He smiled, and said a fleeting goodbye to Arthur, and relaxed his muscles so completely that he no longer felt them at all; then abandoned himself like a broken wave to the beauty and hauteur of Nilor’s finely sculpted face.

There was a deafening roar in his ears, and he heard cries and curses in Kardasi, felt the auditory equivalent of armored creatures clawing at the mesh of a trawling net.

 _You fucking traitor_ , it shouted. _You fool. You wind-worshipping Bajoran. You human-lover. _He grabbed his head and tried to expel the voices. There were twinges of desire, for Rochal, for his killing machine. He felt the glory of clicking the wheels in place and watching a man’s face contort as he pulled his brain apart drop by drop.__

 _  
_But no. Not that man. You’re not getting him, Nilor. I told you._   
_

His vision unclouded, and he looked in the mirror. There was no Arthur there anymore, only the handsome young Cardassian whose face he’d been touching. He’d done it. Like Eames did when he first began forging, he projected his projection onto himself, wore it like a living, writhing, wanting skin. He heard its siren call, but it felt distant, hollow. No desires he didn’t deal with every day.

The guards had loosened their holds on his arms in fright, unsure what was happening.

 _Fuck these guys._

Arthur found himself holding a disruptor, the nasty kind, and he dispatched the brutes in a matter of seconds, leaving only faint plumes of smoke behind for their imaginary families.

He ran out of the room and into the hall, where he slammed into Rochal,

“What’s wrong, Nilor?” Rochal asked. “You look unsettled.”

“Your fucking molecules look unsettled,” Arthur hissed, raising the disruptor.

*

He burst into the room, firing the disruptor at the guard who was fiddling with the death device.

“Eames,” he panted, breathless, rushing to struggle with the shackles on the chair. His pupils were enormous, leaving only a fingernail’s thickness of gray around the edges. Whatever had been done to him, he looked thoroughly tormented, disgusted, weaker than a piece of wet bread.

“Get the fuck away from me,” he wheezed, struggling feebly to move.

“No. Please. It’s me,” he said softly, resting his hand on Eames’s clammy forehead and leaning down to kiss his eyebrow as though someone had permitted him only that gesture in which to say everything. “I’ll explain later. But please trust me. I swear, it’s me.”

He pointed the disruptor at Eames’s heart. He closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.


	11. Chapter 11

His eyes shot open. He reached in his pocket, fumbling for the weighted die, and looked down at it. He felt too impatient to spend even that half a second looking at anything but Eames, but it was necessary. He had to be sure that he was safe—that they were safe.

The die bounced dully on the bedspread. Three, three, three. He kept looking back and forth at the die and at Eames, who should have been awake, upright. Should have been pointing a gun at him. Should have already _shot_ him, even. Should have _something._ Fuck.

But he was still lying with the cannula in his arm. Eyes were open, eyelids twitching. He looked terribly like he had in the dream, skin sopping, pupils aggressively pushing his irises away. Arthur approached him with trepidation, leaning over him, afraid to look too searchingly into his eyes. Feeling his own heart like a depth charge.

“Eames,” he said softly. Eames’s lips were trembling. He looked like he was struggling to say something.

Arthur reached out and touched his face. He was burning up, sweat pooling in the troubled lines of his forehead.

“ _Khre’ip’t_ ,” Arthur said, his mouth tasting unbearably sour, his tongue feeling like an engorged parasite. He was allowing himself to speak Kardasi aloud for the first time in the real world. In Kardasi _khre’ip’t_ was a curse, but one not used lightly, not used for spilling fermori or losing at kotra. It was for watching four Klingon Birds of Prey decloak around you when your torpedoes were at twenty percent.

It was for losing everything.

The device must have triggered a dangerous release of neurotransmitters, he thought. Overstimulated the 5-HT receptors. With literally millions of pleasurable sensations at once. And, as he knew well from his time in the Order, too much of a neurotransmitter flooded into the system at once could make a person very ill very quickly. Could kill.

*  
He’d never met this chemist, Sara, before, but Eames trusted her, and she had paramedic training. And plenty of equipment. She was a short, stocky woman in black pumps, with her hair pulled back in a red headband, and she stared at Arthur as if he had no business being anywhere near her while she fed an IV line into Eames’s arm and injected him with something—a muscle relaxant, probably, judging by the way his violent spasms seemed to ease a few seconds later.

“You should probably go outside,” she said crisply. “Walk around the block. I’ll call you if I need you.”

“He’s my coworker. I feel responsible for what happened.”

She gave him a skeptical look.

“You’re a wreck. Go outside.”

He stepped outside. It was dusk, and a few teenage girls in flowered dresses and high heels were smoking outside the door. The neighborhood was mostly modular, modernist; gray concrete high-rises, the kind that had sad sweat stains after it rained. There were a few lower Spanish-style buildings incongruously fitted in with the featureless rectangles. It was the kind of neighborhood Eames always preferred to live in—dense with buildings and people, all spaces packed, things seeming to fit not according to any grand plan but anywhere they could go. He remembered Ariadne once yelling at Eames for glamorizing poorer neighborhoods: for treating them as a curiosity, a private tourist attraction that he could just pick up and leave whenever he got bored.

 _Fair enough_ , he’d said, lips pursed, eyebrows tense, apparently giving the idea serious thought.

He breathed in the exhaust from mopeds, traced the iridescent line of an oil leak down a grate. An American rap song was playing from a car. A stray orange cat darted from curb to curb. He sat down on the curb in front of the apartment building, looking nervously up at the windows. As if that would tell him anything. The curtains were still drawn; he couldn’t even see any shadows moving behind them.

He’d made up a feeble story which sounded believable enough; told her that they’d been developing something for a client, a pleasure-increasing machine of a sort, and it had gone horribly wrong. She seemed to buy it.

But he wondered why he’d believed Rochal in the first place, about what this thing could do. Why didn’t he just assume he was bluffing? Well, Rochal--any person or thing bearing the name of Rochal--had too much pride to bluff about something so beautifully lethal. He couldn’t stand being proven wrong, ever.

But more than that, Arthur really hadn’t wanted to be wrong. Really hadn’t wanted to think it was all an elaborate psychological torture and then watch Eames die, not just in his dream but in reality too. He couldn’t shake the image of his first sight of Eames, stiff and shaking, feverish, eyes open but barely connecting with anything. He’d never seen him so vulnerable. He never wanted to again.

*

“I told you, I’d tell you when to come up,” Sara said crossly. “He’s not dead, if that’s what you’re afraid of. His fever’s gone down a bit. I think he’ll make it.”

Arthur walked hurriedly over to Eames's side and knelt down, brushing his forearm lightly.

“The sedatives put him out. He’ll be under for maybe ten hours. Then, hopefully, he’ll wake up, maybe be conscious enough to talk. Call me if anything changes.”

He sprung up and coughed, shuffled, looked back again at Eames, who at least no longer looked as though every cell in his body was being stretched to snapping point.

“Thank you. Thank you so much.”

She packed up her supplies, then hesitated for a moment, saying nothing.

“Oh.” Arthur reached in his pocket and pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills, which he handed to her. She nodded and folded them into her wallet.

“Well,” she said, “if you’re ever doing anything like that again, call me. If it goes well, I want to be part of a great discovery. If you fuck it up again, I might at least be able to save you from getting killed.”

*

He dragged the brown wicker chair over to the side of the bed and sat down. He felt he had no right to sit on the bed with him, not when Eames thought he’d consciously done this to him.

His forehead was still warm to the touch, and his hair clung to it in rivulets. Arthur touched his neck, which was slippery, drenched. His light blue shirt had huge platter-sized blooms of sweat on it, and he unbuttoned it, opened it, pulled Eames’s arms gently out of the sleeves.

Arthur searched the linen closet for a clean washcloth and basin. He turned on the tap and waited for the cold water, then soaked the cloth; and when he looked up at himself in the mirror, he was half expecting to see Nilor, sharp, gloating, greyscale, But in the wan light he only saw Arthur, banners of sagging skin beneath his eyes, mouth dry and pulled like a drawstring, a day’s growth of black stubble on his chin. He was oddly comforted by seeing that face, comforted by the lack of confidence in his eyes.

He pressed the washcloth to Eames’s forehead, trailing it down the side of his face, moving up just slightly past the hairline. He dabbed his neck and collarbones, watching the water mingle with the sweat; dipped the washcloth into the basin and pressed it again tentatively to Eames’s chest, the part covered by lush gingery hair. He sponged that area too, careful to touch it only with the washcloth and not with the skin of his hand. The sun had set. They were almost in darkness, but his vision was meant for that.

His hand trailed back over the cooled-down places he’d bathed, cupped Eames’s cheek, rubbed the stubble with his thumb. The corner of Eames’s lips were right there. He avoided the temptation to touch it even with the edge of his fingernail.

It struck him how oddly delicate Eames’s face was. Maybe delicate wasn’t the word—his features weren’t overly fine, but there was a sweetness that tempered the straight, bold lines of his nose and the sometimes intimidating amplitude of his lips; it was partly the doll-like rosiness of his mouth and cheeks, and partly the look he had sometimes, the look of a pensive, flushed boy realizing for the first time that he will grow old as the old men whose jackets he turns inside out as a prank. And now he looked so helpless, lips slightly parted, breath sighing, moisture glistening in the corners of his eyes, and Arthur thought he was beautiful. It wasn’t a new thought, not at all, but it was overwhelming, and Arthur grasped his hand and kissed the knuckles softly, furtively.

 _Mer’tal sepr inat kitala reon,_ he whispered. _Mer’tal enaram fiyat reshk’oul, na datg, siyt sepr ungo’al._

*

He kept his vigil through the night. Little went through his mind; he felt he didn’t deserve the luxury of thoughts. He had flashes of home, which he tried to separate from that awful mockery of it he’d just seen, and he had no desire to ever see a false Cardassia again. All Cardassias felt impossibly far away now. Only his language, his native language, sharp and precise and arching like a cartilage sword, felt whole and real to him. His projections of Nilor and Rochal had spoken it, but so had his mother, filling him with the names of their ancestors, with the words of the Childlike Poets of the Third Cycle; so had his best childhood friend, a girl named Ketali, who taught him how to make a phaser shoot harmless blue light and told him how to kiss a boy.

In Kardasi were all his desires; it was the root cellar in which he’d made and stored all the things he’d hoped one day to say; and they were still there, too heavy to move, able only to be opened, to be used.

Dawn came, a slate-blue band over the curtains, and Eames still slept heavily. Arthur took his pulse; it was slow but even, and he kissed it. He angrily silenced the voice that called him a sentimental fool.

His fever had abated, and there were goosebumps on his arms. Arthur pulled the light sheet over his body, watched with guilty desire as it caressed his bare skin in settling. This could be the last time, he thought. The last time I touch him. The last time I see him. It made him press his lips to Eames’s, more of a touch than a kiss, and brush his hair back from his forehead, still inches away from his face.

“Mmm,” Eames sighed.

Arthur drew back in alarm.

Eames closed his eyes tightly, then they drifted open, dazed for a moment before they settled on Arthur. Arthur dug his nails into his palm, breathed deeply, steadied himself to be eviscerated.

“Arthur?” Eames asked, a smile slowly forming on his face. His voice was halting, cracked; he was trying to raise his head from the pillow and failing, and Arthur rushed to adjust the pillow. “Oh God, you…oh, sweetheart, please, please don’t cry.”

“I’m not going to cry,” Arthur stated, somewhat sullenly.

“Good,” Eames whispered. “Because I’d hate myself.”

“Eames,” Arthur began, “do you—do you remember what happened?”

He paused, raked his teeth across his chapped upper lip.

“Every bloody moment,” he asserted grimly.

“Then how do you still give a fuck about me?” Arthur nearly spat. “I saw the way you looked at me. You thought I was repulsive. You’d seen me betray you, torture you, almost fucking kill you.”

“No I didn’t,” he rasped.

“Then what—“

“Because it wasn’t you.” He struggled to lift his hand to Arthur’s cheek, and Arthur, out of impulse, took his hand, pressed it against the rough skin of his face. “How do I know? Two ways. First, your friend Nilor? He held his weapon with his left hand. He led with his left hand. You held yours in your right hand.”

“Left-handed children on Cardassia are generally re-educated,” Arthur admitted. “I suppose it makes sense that my subconscious is left-handed.”

“But that didn’t really register until I noticed the second thing,” Eames continued. “It was when you looked at me, and when you kissed me. I could see your fear, your pain, everything. I knew you were telling the truth.”

Arthur closed his eyes and was still. It was terrifying, all of this—the kindness in Eames’s still-woozy, heavy-lidded eyes; the lifting of the fear he was almost certain would come true.

“Lie down with me,” Eames managed. “You look exhausted. Sleep.”

“I have to call Sara.”

“Call Sara. Then sleep.”

*

The IV was out. Sara had given him a clean bill of health, told Arthur to get some sleep, and casually mentioned that she’d read of an American expat convicted of a high-profile crime who might be interested in any secrets that could help him clear his name. He said he’d consider pursuing the lead provided Eames was well enough, to which she gave a soft, knowing smile.

Then he’d lain down, curled himself around Eames, and tried to sleep.

“Arthur, I know you’re not asleep,” Eames scoffed, poking him weakly. Sara had warned him that he would probably be weak for a few days, and need a lot of rest, but said that soon he could likely do almost anything he felt up to doing. Arthur swore he’d detected some innuendo in that _almost everything._

“I can’t right now,” he murmured into Eames’s shoulder. “You have to understand.”

“I do.”

Arthur drew a deep, almost painful breath.

“When you’re stronger,” he started, shakily, “when you’re stronger, I think I should leave.”

Eames was silent for a moment.

“Turn me so I can face you.”

Arthur leaned over, levering Eames’s torso up with his arm, and turned him on his side, careful not to jar his shoulder. Eames exerted all his effort to bring his hand, trembling, up to Arthur’s chin.

Eames’s gray eyes looked somehow both amused and wounded.

“You’re going to leave?” his lips quirked. “You’ve barely seen the city. Some beautiful architecture I can show you. And there’s plenty of work here. And you’ve barely seen what I can do. We’ve only slept together once, you know. I’d like to think that wasn’t my best performance.”

“It was wonderful,” Arthur soothed, leaning in to kiss the bridge of his nose. “For me. For you, I don’t know. And now that you know what I look like…”

“Arthur, fuck,” Eames said crossly. “Maybe you were hoping, out of some twisted anthropological interest, to learn how it feels to be physically unattractive, but you aren’t going to learn it from me.”

“So you thought…”

“I thought you were exquisite, you dolt,” Eames said, smiling. “Granted, sex wasn’t the first thing on my mind. But even a dying man in the process of getting his balls metaphorically wrenched off can appreciate a vision of beauty like that.”

“What did you think, exactly?”

“What a vain creature you are,” Eames retorted. “You’d just love to hear all about yourself, wouldn’t you? I’m a sick man, Arthur.”

Arthur sighed.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, my pretty sweetheart, don’t look so sad,” Eames prodded affectionately. “I haven’t had much time to think about all the things I wish I could do to all of those delicate ridges and lines of yours, but believe me, I will think about it. I’d love to kiss you here,” he said, raising his hand to trace weakly where the teardrop-shaped form on his forehead had been. “And under your eye. And over your eye. And that’s to say nothing of the parts I didn’t see.”

Arthur reached out to touch him, to run his hand over his bare arm, rubbing his thumb over the sensitive inside of his elbow, where he’d always dreamed of kissing him.

“ _Mer’tal sepr inat kitala reon_ ,” he said.

Eames looked slightly rattled, and Arthur immediately remembered with regret that he’d probably heard his captors barking out orders in Kardasi.

“What does that mean?”

“It means, my country is first on my list of marvels,” he explained softly. “It’s a line from a poem about desire.”

“Sounds romantic,” Eames said, sounding a bit sarcastic.

“It is,” said Arthur wistfully. “Cardassian lyric poetry—epic and patriotic poetry is an entirely different beast, mind--is about the absences. If you speak of a list of wonders, and stubbornly speak of everything but love, then you are speaking about love most of all.”

“So that poem is about love?”

“Some say it’s the only poem about love.”


End file.
